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

From: Medical Education Online <Editor_at_MED-ED-ONLINE.ORG>
Date: Sat, 21 Dec 2002 08:21:20 -0500

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 +0000, 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 Some of it is not peer-reviewed journals, and many of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 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 crediting them to self-archiving. What is needed is a 3-year
>time series, showing the growth of the number of self-archived
>peer-reviewed articles and the number of articles published in
>open-access journals -- comparing them to one another (with
>subcomparisons by fields) as well as to the estimated total number of
>peer-reviewed articles annually, so we can estimate how soon universal
>open-access will be achieved (and what route will complete it first).
>
>And (as noted by Helene, as well as myself) it will also be important to
>ascertain the "level" at which the relative growth in open-access is
>taking place. Estimates of the quality/impact level of both the
>open-access journals and the self-archived articles will need to be
>made, for whereas the Public Library of Science is explicitly aiming at
>a top-down approach (capturing the highest-level research initially,
>and allowing the effect to generalize downward as a result), some of
>the initial spontaneous new and converted open-access journals may be
>coming more from the lower, weaker levels of the current hierarchy
>20,000-journal quality hierarchy (and such bottom-up effects may be
>slower to generalize than top-down effects). It will also be interesting
>to know the correlation between an article's quality/impact and the
>probability that it is self-archived (although here we already
>know that there is a post-hoc causal connection too -- for
>"free online access substantially increases a paper's impact"
>http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/lawrence.html ).
>http://citebase.eprints.org
>
>Stevan Harnad
>
>On Fri, 20 Dec 2002, Thomas Krichel wrote:
>
> >sh> The excellent (truly remarkable!) Regensburg resource Ebs cites below:
>http://rzblx1.uni-regensburg.de/ezeit/index.phtml?bibid=AAAAA&colors=7&lang=en
> >sh> lists 759 Physics journals, of which 103 (14%) are open
> >sh> access. (Is this complete?)
> >
> > The list is a remarkable piece of work. It is unfortunate that
> > you seem to missread their data. When they 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.

Medical Education Online
A-202 E. Fee Hall
MSU
E. Lansing, Mi 48824

(517) 353-2037 Voice
(517) 432-1798
Editor_at_med-ed-online.org
Received on Sat Dec 21 2002 - 13:21:20 GMT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Dec 10 2010 - 19:46:47 GMT