Defining embargo periods by discipline?

[David Wojick]

Dear Loet,

Not being an economist I do not know what marginal value means. Ironically in ordinary language marginal means low value.

But several groups have suggested that they need longer embargo periods, such as the historians and the civil engineers, so I am looking to develop an analytical method. I do not see the journal as the unit of analysis, rather the article and/or the discipline depending on what you mean. But the journal may be the unit of compliance, as it were, depending on how the final OA systems are designed. How multi-discipline journals might be handled is itself a major design problem. As I say in my article discipline specific embargo periods may be too hard to do.

I know there are statistical distribution problems with using citations as a proxy but if citations are the only comprehensive data we have then we may have to use them. Regulatory mechanisms need to be simple, which often makes them crude.

I appreciate your thoughts on this,

David

On Mar 2, 2013, at 5:09 AM, Loet Leydesdorff <loet at LEYDESDORFF.NET> wrote:

> Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe): http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html
> Dear David,
> 
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> 
> > Abstractly the proper embargo period is the shortest one that does not damage the journals in the discipline financially because of significant subscription cancellations. The idea is that this period varies by discipline due to differences in the rate of diffusion of research results.
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> This is an economic problem about the marginal value, isn’t it?
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> The journal as unit of analysis is then problematic because the value of articles within a journal will be distributed; and probably so skewedly that central tendency statistics cannot provide a satisfying answer.
> 
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> Best,
> 
> Loet
> 
>  
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