Re: Wrong Advice On Open Access: History Repeating Itself

From: Couture Marc <couture.marc_at_TELUQ.UQAM.CA>
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:35:44 -0500

Hélène Bosc wrote :

>
> I can give the example of the 65 researchers of the lab of PRC at INRA in France who publish
> about 100 articles a year.
>
> Since 2003 our researchers publish in OA periodicals (essentially BMC periodicals).
>
> [...]
>
> 3 in 2008
>

As an exercise, I cross-checked with DOAJ's list the 89 articles published in 2008 (in 50 journals) from the INRA database (PUBLICAT), and found 5 more articles published in four different OA Journals (including PLoS Biology).

Yet, this total of 8 articles, or 9% of the total INRA article output, is quite unimpressive. Nevertheless - and noting that this excludes articles which may have been published with optional (fee-based) or delayed OA - it is comparable to what obtains with spontaneous (i.e. unmandated and unsupported) self-archiving. A (maximum) rate of 15% is often quoted; my rule-of-thumb estimate of the self-archiving (unmandated and unsupported) rate at my university (UQAM) is less than 5%.

Returning again to Université de Liège's extraordinary success (15 000 deposits in 15 months), further examination of the information on the site of the archive suggests that it is the result of both an institutional mandate and various types of technical support offered to, to paraphrase Stevan Harnad, further reduce the number of keystrokes between now and a 100%-OA world.

I suggest to everyone involved in IR development to have a look, and maybe get some ideas...

http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/project?locale=en&id=106

Marc Couture
Received on Thu Nov 12 2009 - 00:06:58 GMT

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