Re: What is the threshold for open access Nirvana?

From: Garfield, Eugene <Garfield_at_codex.cis.upenn.edu>
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2004 20:40:45 +0000

You have avoided my main point by regurgitating to me what you have stated
before. However, I appreciate your prompt response. Don't you ever sleep?
Gene

When responding, please attach my original message
__________________________________________________
Eugene Garfield, PhD. email: garfield_at_codex.cis.upenn.edu
home page: www.eugenegarfield.org
Tel: 215-243-2205 Fax 215-387-1266
President, The Scientist LLC. www.the-scientist.com
3535 Market St., Phila. PA 19104-3389
Chairman Emeritus, ISI www.isinet.com
3501 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-3302
Past President, American Society for Information Science and Technology
(ASIS&T) www.asis.org


-----Original Message-----
From: Stevan Harnad [mailto:harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk]
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 2:27 PM
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Re: What is the threshold for open access Nirvana?

On Wed, 14 Jan 2004, Garfield, Eugene wrote:

> I think you have introduced a significant distortion to the discussion
> by quoting the figure of 24,000 scientific journals...
> A more realistic figure for journals would be ten to fifteen thousand
> scientific journals putting aside the crucial question of definition.

The 24,000 figure comes from Ulrich's/Bowkers
http://www.ulrichsweb.com/ulrichsweb/analysis/
and it is not for *scientific* journals only but for all
*peer-reviewed* journals. Open access is not just for scientific
research, but for scholarly research as well.

> Since it has been demonstrated that on line access improves both
readership
> and citation impact we can certainly expect that the vast majority of the
> low impact journals would be well advised to make their journals open
> access. Whether this increases their impact remains to be seen, but
> increased readership or attention seems inevitable.

There are also data showing that download impact is strongly correlated
with later citation impact.
http://citebase.eprints.org/analysis/correlation.php

    Hitchcock, Steve, Tim Brody, Christopher Gutteridge, Les Carr,
    Wendy Hall, Stevan Harnad, Donna Bergmark, Carl Lagoze, Open Citation
    Linking: The Way Forward. D-Lib Magazine. Volume 8 Number 10. October
    2002. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october02/hitchcock/10hitchcock.html

    Hitchcock, Steve; Woukeu, Arouna; Brody, Tim; Carr, Les; Hall,
    Wendy and Harnad, Stevan. (2003) Evaluating Citebase, an open
    access Web-based citation-ranked search and impact discovery service
http://opcit.eprints.org/evaluation/Citebase-evaluation/evaluation-report.ht
ml

More data on the causal connection between access and impact are being
collected and analyzed. It is hoped that these data will be sufficient
to persuade all researchers (not just scientists!) as well as their
institutions and funders that open-acess provision is optimal for
research -- and that it can be done immediately.

     Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003)
     Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives:
     Improving the UK Research Assessment Exercise whilst
     making it cheaper and easier. Ariadne 35 (April 2003).
     http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/harnad/

Stevan Harnad

NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open
access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004)
is available at the American Scientist Open Access Forum:
        To join the Forum:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.h
tml
        Post discussion to:
    american-scientist-open-access-forum_at_amsci.org
        Hypermail Archive:
    http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html

Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy:
    BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access
            journal whenever one exists.
            http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals
    BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable
            toll-access journal and also self-archive it.
            http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
    http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
    http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
Received on Wed Jan 14 2004 - 20:40:45 GMT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Dec 10 2010 - 19:47:17 GMT