OA Growth Monitoring Needs a Google Data-Mining Exemption

[Burns, Christopher S]

Jeroen,

On Mon, 2013-08-26 at 10:12 +0000, Bosman, J.M. wrote:
> Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe):
> http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html 
> Stevan, Sean,
> 
> Do you know..
> 
> 1)  How many of the freely available full text versions are “black
> OA”, i.e. shared against copyright? I know many examples of that in
> for instance ResearchGate, that is indexed by Google Scholar….

My study was more about academic libraries and collection management
than it was about OA, so I didn't measure things such "black OA"
specifically. That said, for the 2010 sample of bibliographic
references, 3.93% of them in 2012 were retrieved from "personal
websites," such as the kind any of us may have, and 3.49% were
retrievable from a mix of other places. So the likely maximum number of
Black OA items in the sample would have been the sum of those (7.42%),
but the minimum would be zero.

Per Stephan Harnad, whose reply just came in, these would include both
B1 and B2.

> 2)  To what extent the growth of available OA versions can be
> explained
> by increasing numbers of green OA versions of which the embargo period
> has ended and to what extent to more general acceptance of OA by
> scholars? It seems likely that the first effect will be more
> pronounced
> 6-24 months after a period of exceptional growth of self-archiving in
> repositories etc.

I didn't look at this specifically, either, but in the sample I took,
holding the articles constant at the year 2010, there was a 8.10%
increase, from 2010 to 2012, in the number of full text articles that
were available via Google Scholar.

I hope that helps a bit.

Sean Burns

>  
> 
> Jeroen Bosman
> 
> Utrecht University Library