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

[Stevan Harnad]

>> SH: 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.
>
> I simply did not know that OA aimed at articles only in the top  
> journals. Tell this to our friends in India, South-Africa and  
> Brazil, and you will see their reaction.

This completely misses the point of my posting, which was about the  
often quoted (and correct, but equivocal) fact that most OA journals  
do not charge a publication fee: True. But most of the top OA journals  
do charge a publication fee (and most of the top journals are not OA  
journals).

> OA is not only for the scientific élite... It might be time to  
> separate quality science from élite science.

The point has nothing to do with "eliteness." By the top journals I  
meant the top quality journals. And quality is determined by peer- 
review standards. Get peers in each field to rank the journals in  
their field by quality (which does not necessarily mean impact  
factor). Then see which proportion of the top 10% are OA compared to  
the proportion of the remaining 90%. Then check which proportion of  
the OA journals that are in that top 10% do not charge a publication  
fee, compared to the proportion in the remaining 90%.

> And if OA were only for élite science, what would be the OA  
> advantage? Élite science tends to be located in élite schools with  
> reasonably well-stocked libraries. In such schools, the OA advantage  
> becomes far less visible, as apparently demonstrated in some areas  
> of cosmology, etc.

I couldn't follow all of that.

But if the question is whether the OA advantage (higher downloads,  
more citations) is evenly distributed across all articles, or across  
all quality-ranges, the answer is decidedly not.

Perhaps it is a 2nd-order effect of the Pareto/Seglen rule (that the  
top 10-20% of articles received 80-90% of all citations) that the OA  
advantage is mostly to the top 10-20% of articles. See

Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Gingras, Y. (2005) Ten-Year Cross- 
Disciplinary Comparison of the Growth of Open Access and How it  
Increases Research Citation Impact. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin  
28(4) pp. 39-47. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11688/

and

Gargouri Y. & Harnad  S. (in prep.) http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/yassine/SelfArchiving/LogisticRegression.htm

Stevan Harnad

> -----Original Message-----
> From: American Scientist Open Access Forum on behalf of Stevan Harnad
> Sent: Mon 6/15/2009 3:02 PM
> To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM at LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
> Subject:      Re: On Proportion and Strategy: OA, non-OA, Gold-OA,  
> Paid-OA
>
> On 15-Jun-09, at 1:12 PM, David E. Wojick wrote:
>
>> 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
>
> David, with pleasure (and my apologies for assuming transparency). The
> proportions are,
> I think, very important not just for OA reasons, but for bibliometric
> reasons too.
> Please see the further explanations below. -- Stevan
>
>>> 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).
>
> A peer-reviewed journal article is Green OA if it has been made OA by
> its author,
> http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html
> by depositing it in an Open Access Repository (preferably his own
> institution's OAI-compliant Institutional Repository)
> http://roar.eprints.org/
> from which anyone can access it for free on the web.
>
> A peer-reviewed journal article is Gold OA if it has been published in
> a Gold OA journal
> http://www.doaj.org/
> from which anyone can access it for free on the web.
>
> There are at least 25,000 peer-reviewed journals, across all fields
> worldwide.
> http://www.ulrichsweb.com/ulrichsweb/
>
>>> 2. The vast majority of journals are Green OA.
>
> Of the 10,000+ journals whose OA policies are indexed in SHERPA/Romeo,
> over 90% endorse immediate deposit and immediate OA by the author
> 63% for the author's peer-reviewed final draft (the postprint), and a
> further
> 32% for the pre-refereeing preprint.
> http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php
>
>>> 3. The vast majority of journals are not Gold OA.
>
> Currently 4221 journals are Gold OA according to DOAJ
>
> (Note that the c. 10,000 journals in Romeo do not include most of the
> Gold OA journals, although these would all be classed as Green, and
> all Gold OA journals also endorse Green OA self-archiving. Romeo
> does, however, index just about all of the top journals.)
>
>>> 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.
>
> There are somewhere around 10,000 universities and research  
> institutions
> worldwide. So far, 51 of them -- plus 36 research funders -- have
> mandated
> (i.e. required) their peer-reviewed research output to be made Green  
> OA
> by depositing it in an OA repository.
> http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/
>
>>> Stevan Harnad

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