Re: Need for systematic scientometric analyses of open-access data

[Imre Simon]

In my mind the need for systematic scientometric data for the
open-access literature and also for the OAI-compliant literature as
well as the whole literature is unquestionable.

I wonder whether a significant first step should not be an effort to
have more open-access journals act as OAI-compliant data providers?

I have the impression that many of the 3.000 open-access journals are
*not* OAI data providers. If they made such a move one would have
300.000 openly accessible full text peer-reviewed articles every year
in the OAI system and that would be a very interesting starting point
for the scientometric time-series.

Would it be feasible to ask BOAI to undertake such a campaign? After
all this would be just a bridge between BOAI-1 and BOAI-2.

Or am I wrong in my hypothesis?

Cheers,

Imre Simon

By the way, SciELO Brazil has 93 open access full text peer-reviewed
(brazilian) journals on the Internet:

  http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_alphabetic&lng=en&nrm=iso

: Date:Sat, 21 Dec 2002 14:38:12 +
: From:Stevan Harnad 
: Subject: Re: Need for systematic scientometric analyses of open-access data
:
: On Sat, 21 Dec 2002, Andrew Odlyzko wrote:
:
: > To second what some others have written, there are surely far
: > more than 200 peer-reviewed open-access journals.  Just in
: > mathematics alone there appear to be over 50 (if one merges
: > the two lists at <http://www.emis.de/journals/index.html>
: > and <http://www.ams.org/mathweb/mi-journals2.html>).
:
: Dear colleagues,
:
: I accept that 200/20,000 (1%) was an under-estimate of the current ratio
: of open-access/total peer-reviewed journals!
:
: Let the guesstimate instead be 3000/20,000 (15%) -- or even higher!
:
: But now can I repeat my suggestion that we do need to perform
: the finer-grained time-series analysis I sketched, to estimate and
: extrapolate the relative size and growth-rate of open-access via BOAI-1
: (self-archiving) and via BOAI-2 (open-access journals), within and across
: disciplines -- and also to answer the very significant question of where
: in the quality-hierarchy the respective open-access growth is occurring.
:
: The clearer picture such an analysis will provide of where the growth
: regions are, which way they are growing, and how long they are likely
: to take to approach 100% can surely only be helpful to us in planning
: our future strategy and deploying our energy and resources.
:
: Stevan Harnad

Re: Need for systematic scientometric analyses of open-access data

[Stevan Harnad]

On Sat, 21 Dec 2002, Thomas Krichel wrote:

>sh> Now the immediate occasion for this discussion thread was the recent $9
>sh> million grant to the Public Library of Science for the founding of new
>sh> open-access journals (i.e., BOAI-2):
>sh> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2517.html
>sh>
>sh> This is excellent news for open access
>
>   Maybe.
>
>   But is it good news for scholarly communication? Probably not.
>
>   They want $1500 per submission. We discussed that with the RePEc
>   community. A library would  have to cancel one of the expensive
>   journals in our discipline for a year to fund one submission.

Thomas, you definitely have a point. But consider this:

(1) The Public Library of Science has a very specific strategy here --
a top-down rather than a bottom-up strategy: They are going into direct
competition with the highest quality/impact toll-access journals in
the biomedical hierarchy, rather than simply trying to convert weaker
toll-access journals into open-access ones (or to start new low-level
journals on shoestring budgets).

(2) The hope is that -- if the PLoS strategy is successful, and these new
high-level open-access journals successfully compete for the authorship
of their high-level toll-access competitors -- that this will start
a domino effect, from top-down (which is much easier than doing it
bottom-up), with the result that all (biomedical) journals will convert
to open-access.

(3) While most journals are still toll-access, this does indeed mean a
higher cost burden on authors and their institutions (and that is partly
why subsidies are available for those who cannot afford it). But once the
dominos begin to fall, institutions will begin to enjoy windfall savings
from their diminishing toll-expenditures, and then there will be more than
enough to pay the publication costs.

Again, though, this is all hypothetical. Any of these expectations may
fail to meet with success. We will have to try and see. And meanwhile,
let us not forget that a second strategy is still in place for those who
are not yet ready to submit their work to open-access journals (or who
do not yet have suitable open-access journals to submit it to), namely,
self-archiving their toll-access papers (BOAI-1).
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm

I would also like to make a prediction: With the help of self-archiving
(which will distribute the archiving load across all the interoperable
institutional Eprint Archives) it will soon become apparent that the
only remaining essential function of an open-access journal is
implementing peer review, which costs at most $500 per paper -- which
will be much more affordable, especially once the dominos fall and
institutions have at least four times as much as that in annual windfall
savings. Open-access journals will duly cost-cut and downsize to fit
that sustainable niche.

>   Using data from Ted Bergstrom, Bob Parks made a rough calculation
>   that if a library took all the journals in Ted's list, which
>   has many journals in economics and certainly the most expensive
>   ones, it could fund 42 submissions with the money that it
>   would save from cancelling all the subscriptions (assuming that
>   it would buy all of them: no library does that). Now note
>   that these are submissions, not accepted papers. If they
>   have a high rejection rate, you burn all your money for
>   your serial budget in trying to get into one of the
>   two journals. None except the very well-funded will be able
>   to publish there.

All good points, but not the right way to do the estimates, I think.
First, although I am ready to be corrected, I believe the $500
peer-review cost will prove to be per accepted paper, not per submitted
paper (although levying a much lower submission charge as well --
creditable toward acceptance if accepted  -- might not be such a bad
idea, to discourage nuisance submissions that waste many referees'
[freely given] time while the paper works its way down the quality
hierarchy until it finds a journal at the level that it should have
submitted to in the first place!). (I make no defense of the $1,500
publication cost, except that it may be necessary to test the BOAI-2
top-down strategy.)

So, with the (conservative) estimate of $500 per (accepted) paper
peer-review costs, this is the way that institutions need to do the
arithmetic:

(1) What is the current annual number of peer-reviewed papers
published by researchers at your institution? Multiply by $500 and
call that P.

(2) What is the total annual expenditure of your institution in
toll-costs for peer-reviewed journals (subscription, site-license,
pay per view). Call that T.

Prediction: T >> P  (probably about 3 or 4:1).

>   Can anyone tell me how an organization can cash in $9 Million,
>   over 5 years, and not be able to operate two, presumably
>   online, journals with this money without charging a subm

Re: Need for systematic scientometric analyses of open-access data

[Thomas Krichel]

  Stevan Harnad writes

> Now the immediate occasion for this discussion thread was the recent $9
> million grant to the Public Library of Science for the founding of new
> open-access journals (i.e., BOAI-2):
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2517.html
>
> This is excellent news for open access

  Maybe.

  But is it good news for scholarly communication? Probably not.

  They want $1500 per submission. We discussed that with the RePEc
  community. A library would  have to cancel one of the expensive
  journal in our discipline for a year to fund one submission. Using
  data from Ted Bergstrom, Bob Parks made a rough calculation
  that if a library took all the journals in Ted's list, which
  has many journals in economics and certainly the most expensive
  ones, it could fund 42 submissions with the money that it
  would save from cancelling all the submission, assuming that
  it would buy all of the, no library does that. Now note
  that these are submissions, not accepted papers. If they
  have a high rejection rate, you burn all you money for
  your serial budget onto trying to get into one of the
  two journals. Noone except the very well-funded will be able
  to publish there.

  Can anyone tell me how an organization can cash in $9 Million,
  over 5 years, and not be able to operate two, presumably
  online, journals with this money without charging a submission
  fee, for at least the time that the subsidy runs for?

  Cheers,

  Thomas Krichel   mailto:kric...@openlib.org
  http://openlib.org/home/krichel
  RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel

Re: Need for systematic scientometric analyses of open-access data

[Stevan Harnad]

On Sat, 21 Dec 2002, Andrew Odlyzko wrote:

> To second what some others have written, there are surely far
> more than 200 peer-reviewed open-access journals.  Just in
> mathematics alone there appear to be over 50 (if one merges
> the two lists at 
> and ).

Dear colleagues,

I accept that 200/20,000 (1%) was an under-estimate of the current ratio
of open-access/total peer-reviewed journals!

Let the guesstimate instead be 3000/20,000 (15%) -- or even higher!

But now can I repeat my suggestion that we do need to perform
the finer-grained time-series analysis I sketched, to estimate and
extrapolate the relative size and growth-rate of open-access via BOAI-1
(self-archiving) and via BOAI-2 (open-access journals), within and across
disciplines -- and also to answer the very significant question of where
in the quality-hierarchy the respective open-access growth is occurring.

The clearer picture such an analysis will provide of where the growth
regions are, which way they are growing, and how long they are likely
to take to approach 100% can surely only be helpful to us in planning
our future strategy and deploying our energy and resources.

Stevan Harnad

Re: Need for systematic scientometric analyses of open-access data

[Medical Education Online]

Stevan,

I think your estimate of ~ 200 peer-reviewed open access journals may
significantly underestimate the actual number of such journals.
Tirupalavanam G. Ganesh has compiled a list of open access  peer-reviewed
journals in education which which includes around 100.

http://aera-cr.ed.asu.edu/links.html  (main site)

http://www.csulb.edu/~llarson/e_journals.htm   (mirror site, the main site
wasn't working when I just checked)

There is some overlap with other fields however, education is by no means
in the forefront of the open access movement and I suspect this list, even
with some overlap with other fields accounts for a small segment of the
open access peer-reviewed journals that are being published.

Another excellent list of open access journals in medicine is the Free
Medical Journals site.

http://freemedicaljournals.com/

Though they include journals that do not meet your definition e.g. ones
free after a given period of time, there appears to be a large number that
are truly open access.

Dave Solomon



At 12:51 PM 12/21/2002 +, you wrote:

Thanks to colleagues Thomas Krichel (below) and Helene Bosc (previous
posting) for pointing out (delicately) that I was mistaken to take at
face value Ebs Hilf's cheerful suggestion that my own prior estimate
-- that so far there are only about 200 open-access peer-reviewed
journals (out of 20,000 toll-access peer-reviewed journals in all)
-- may have been too pessimistic!

Perhaps it was not too pessimistic. The Regensburg list (although a
splendid model for how such resources might in the future be organized)
is somewhat illusory. Some of it is not peer-reviewed journals, and many of
those that are listed as in some sense "free," are not open-access (which
means free, complete online access to the full-text).

But please recall the context of all this: There are two BOAI strategies
for achieving open access: BOAI-1 is the self-archiving of toll-access
publications by their authors, in their institutional Eprint Archives,
and BOAI-2 is the creation of new open-access journals (and the conversion
of existing toll-access journals to open access)
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml

All BOAI proponents, including myself, are full supporters of both BOAI
strategies, which complement one another; but some of us devote our
personal efforts more to one strategy or the other. It is no secret that
my own efforts are devoted mostly to BOAI-1 (self-archiving), and I have
reasons for this: I believe the relation between the two strategies is
that self-archiving is immediately feasible, right now, and will prepare
the way for open-access journals, by first making the literature openly
accessible (thereby solving the urgent immediate-access problem) and
then eventually the 20,000 toll-access journals will convert to open
access by downsizing to become peer-review service providers instead of
journal-text providers.

This is merely a hypothesis, however, for although it correctly
describes what is possible and attainable immediately (and has
already been attained by the authors of millions of self-archived
papers: see http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/viewcolls.html
and http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs ) it -- like BOAI-2 -- depends on
second-guessing human nature, which one can never do with assurance! Will
researchers choose to free their own toll-access research by self-archiving
it today? Will they choose to publish in the open-access journals that are
available? Will new open-access journals be created?

Now the immediate occasion for this discussion thread was the recent $9
million grant to the Public Library of Science for the founding of new
open-access journals (i.e., BOAI-2):
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2517.html

This is excellent news for open access -- and a good time to take stock
of the relative progress of BOAI-1 and BOAI-2 to date: What proportion
of the peer-reviewed research literature is currently being made openly
accessible through self-archiving (BOAI-1) and through open-access
journals (BOAI-2), and how quickly are the two complementary strategies
growing?

The immediate metric for comparison is the individual peer-reviewed journal
article. There are about 2 million of those published per year (although
that too is just a very vague guess) in the planet's 20,000 peer
reviewed journals (also a guess). About 200,000 physics papers have been
self-archived since 1991 (but there might possibly be some double-counting
there, because the same paper may appear as a pre-refereeing preprint
and also a peer-reviewed postprint). ResearchIndex has harvested about
500,000 computer science papers from the Web (but how many of them are
peer-reviewed final drafts?); OAIster lists over a million records (but
some of them are double-counted from these other sources, and again the
proportion of them that are peer-reviewed is not yet analyzed). There are
probably other archives, and certainly many more self-archived papers,
on p

Re: Need for systematic scientometric analyses of open-access data

[Eberhard R. Hilf]

Thomas is right.
that is why we check ourselves the physics journals and come up with only
55.
Ebs

.
Eberhard R. Hilf, Dr. Prof.i.R.;
CEO
Institute for Science Networking Oldenburg GmbH
an der Carl von Ossietzky Universitaet
Ammerlaender Heerstr.121; D-26129 Oldenburg
http://www.isn-oldenburg.de/
my homepage: http://isn-oldenburg.de/~hilf
h...@isn-oldenburg.de
tel/Fax: +49-(0)-441-798-2884/5851
Service PhysNet for the EPS: http://www.physics-network.org

Re: Need for systematic scientometric analyses of open-access data

[Stevan Harnad]

Thanks to colleagues Thomas Krichel (below) and Helene Bosc (previous
posting) for pointing out (delicately) that I was mistaken to take at
face value Ebs Hilf's cheerful suggestion that my own prior estimate
-- that so far there are only about 200 open-access peer-reviewed
journals (out of 20,000 toll-access peer-reviewed journals in all)
-- may have been too pessimistic!

Perhaps it was not too pessimistic. The Regensburg list (although a
splendid model for how such resources might in the future be organized)
is somewhat illusory. Some of it is not peer-reviewed journals, and many of
those that are listed as in some sense "free," are not open-access (which
means free, complete online access to the full-text).

But please recall the context of all this: There are two BOAI strategies
for achieving open access: BOAI-1 is the self-archiving of toll-access
publications by their authors, in their institutional Eprint Archives,
and BOAI-2 is the creation of new open-access journals (and the conversion
of existing toll-access journals to open access)
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml

All BOAI proponents, including myself, are full supporters of both BOAI
strategies, which complement one another; but some of us devote our
personal efforts more to one strategy or the other. It is no secret that
my own efforts are devoted mostly to BOAI-1 (self-archiving), and I have
reasons for this: I believe the relation between the two strategies is
that self-archiving is immediately feasible, right now, and will prepare
the way for open-access journals, by first making the literature openly
accessible (thereby solving the urgent immediate-access problem) and
then eventually the 20,000 toll-access journals will convert to open
access by downsizing to become peer-review service providers instead of
journal-text providers.

This is merely a hypothesis, however, for although it correctly
describes what is possible and attainable immediately (and has
already been attained by the authors of millions of self-archived
papers: see http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/viewcolls.html
and http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs ) it -- like BOAI-2 -- depends on
second-guessing human nature, which one can never do with assurance! Will
researchers choose to free their own toll-access research by self-archiving
it today? Will they choose to publish in the open-access journals that are
available? Will new open-access journals be created?

Now the immediate occasion for this discussion thread was the recent $9
million grant to the Public Library of Science for the founding of new
open-access journals (i.e., BOAI-2):
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2517.html

This is excellent news for open access -- and a good time to take stock
of the relative progress of BOAI-1 and BOAI-2 to date: What proportion
of the peer-reviewed research literature is currently being made openly
accessible through self-archiving (BOAI-1) and through open-access
journals (BOAI-2), and how quickly are the two complementary strategies
growing?

The immediate metric for comparison is the individual peer-reviewed journal
article. There are about 2 million of those published per year (although
that too is just a very vague guess) in the planet's 20,000 peer
reviewed journals (also a guess). About 200,000 physics papers have been
self-archived since 1991 (but there might possibly be some double-counting
there, because the same paper may appear as a pre-refereeing preprint
and also a peer-reviewed postprint). ResearchIndex has harvested about
500,000 computer science papers from the Web (but how many of them are
peer-reviewed final drafts?); OAIster lists over a million records (but
some of them are double-counted from these other sources, and again the
proportion of them that are peer-reviewed is not yet analyzed). There are
probably other archives, and certainly many more self-archived papers,
on personal websites, not yet harvested and tallied, in all disciplines.

The corresponding figures for BOAI-2 are also uncertain. It was here
that Ebs suggested I was being too pessimistic. I had estimated that
of the total 20,000 peer-reviewed journals (a guess) about 200 were
open-access journals (also a guess). Ebs suggested mine was a gross
under-estimate, and it was here that he cited the Regensburg data as
counterevidence. I think a closer analysis of the Regensburg data (and
other data from the Web) will indeed show that the number of open-access
journals is higher than 200, perhaps considerably higher. (There may
also be more than 20,000 peer-reviewed journals worldwide.) But not as
high as Ebs has suggested!

The systematic comparison will be subtle, but, I think, very
instructive. Not only do estimates have to sort out the dates of the
open-access articles -- so we can get an estimate of the amount of growth
across time, especially in the last 3 years -- but they will have to
be careful not to double-count the open-access journal articles,
erroneously cr

Re: Need for systematic scientometric analyses of open-access data

[Thomas Krichel]

  Stevan Harnad writes

> The excellent (truly remarkable!) Regensburg resource Ebs cites
> below:
> http://rzblx1.uni-regensburg.de/ezeit/index.phtml?bibid=A&colors=7&lang=e\
> n lists 759 Physics journals, of which 103 (14%) are open
> access. (Is this complete?)

  The list is a remarkable piece of work. It is unfortunate that
  you seem to missread their data. When the award the green mark,
  it means that the journal comes "with freely available fulltext articles".
  It does not mean "open access".

  I checked this out for the Wirtschaftswoche, marked green for, a
  German Economics magazine and by no intents and purposes
  a scholarly journal. Some contents are short full texts,
  others are summaries of articles in the magazine, and
  some are short news items. But this is by no means
  the full contents of the magazine, I should think.


  Cheers,

  Thomas Krichel   mailto:kric...@openlib.org
  http://openlib.org/home/krichel
  RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel

Re: Need for systematic scientometric analyses of open-access data

[hb...@tours.inra.fr]

At 12:34 19/12/02 +, vous avez =E9crit:

>And (subtle, but critically important!), we need to know the *quality
>level* of the current open-access journals -- as well as of the current
>self-archived refereed articles -- within the hierarchy of journals
>(and articles). An estimate of this would come from the journal impact
>factors (and perhaps also the rejection rates) of the open-access journals
>(as estimated, for example, by ISI's http://wos.mimas.ac.uk/),
>compared to the rest, and from the author and article citation (and
>perhaps usage) impacts for the self-archived article (as estimated, for
>example, by http://citebase.eprints.org/ and http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs)

I agree that the quality level of the current open-access journals has
to be scientifically measured by all the means you suggest. Waiting for
this study, I  can only give my impressions in the field that I know:
biology.

It seems that (apart from a few well known titles) the 14% free
access biological periodicals listed by the Electronic Journal Library
http://rzblx1.uni-regensburg.de/ezeit/index.phtml?bibid=3DA&colors=3D7&lang=3Den
are not the most attractive for researchers in biology, even if these
titles are very useful.

It seems that some are newsletters, some look like catalogues, and some
are published in a language not easily read by the majority of scientists.
Many come from countries whose literature has till now been ignored by
others. These publishers have well understood that free online access
is the only way to get out of the shadows!

[See: "Access-Denial, Impact-Denial and the Developing and Developed World"
  http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2171.html ]

So, thank you for reminding us about this useful Regensburg site, but I
prefer not to use for it for estimating the number of free periodicals,
because presently this free-access literature does not seem representative
of what the scientific community is expecting by way of rapid progress in
knowledge creation and access.

Helene Bosc
Unite Physiologie de la Reproduction
et des Comportements
UMR 6073 INRA-CNRS-Universite de Tours
37380 Nouzilly
 France

http://www.tours.inra.fr/
TEL : 02 47 42 78 00
FAX : 02 47 42 77 43
e-mail: hb...@tours.inra.fr