On Proportion and Strategy: OA, non-OA, Gold-OA, Paid-OA

[David E. Wojick]

Steve, for us non-experts in OA (this is not an OA listserv) can you explain briefly what Gold and Green OA are in these proportions? Especially Green OA in reference to proportions 1 & 7. They seem to be two different measurements. The vast majority of journals are GOA but the vast majority of articles are not.

I don't see how your conclusions follow from these simple proportions, not without additional premises. Perhaps you can explain that.

David


>Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe):
>http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html
>
>As I do not have exact figures on most of the 9 proportions I
>highlight below, I am expressing them only in terms of "vast majority"
>(75% or higher) vs. "minority" (25% or lower) -- rough figures that we
>can be confident are approximately valid. They turn out to have at
>least one rather important implication.
>
>1. The vast majority of current (peer-reviewed) journal articles are
>not Open Access (OA) (i.e., they are neither self-archived as Green OA
>nor published in a Gold OA journal).
>
>2. The vast majority of journals are Green OA.
>
>3. The vast majority of journals are not Gold OA.
>
>4. The vast majority of citations are to the top minority of articles
>(the Pareto/Seglen 90/10 rule).
>http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/474-guid.html
>
>5. The vast majority of journals (or journal articles) are not among
>the top minority of journals (or journal articles).
>
>6. The vast majority of the top journals are not Gold OA.
>
>7. The vast majority of the top journals are Green OA.
>
>8. The vast majority of Gold OA journals are not paid-publication journals.
>http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/06/careful-confirmation-that-70-of-oa.html
>
>9. The vast majority of the top Gold OA journals are paid-publication journals.
>
>I think two strong conclusions follow from this:
>
>The fact that the vast majority of Gold OA journals are not
>paid-publication journals is not relevant if we are concerned about
>providing OA to the articles in the top journals.
>
>Green OA is the vastly underutilized means of providing OA.
>
>The implication is that it is far more productive (of OA) for
>universities and funders to mandate Green OA than to fund Gold OA.
>
>
>Stevan Harnad