Re: Need for systematic scientometric analyses of open-access data

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Sat, 21 Dec 2002 14:38:12 +0000

On Sat, 21 Dec 2002, Andrew Odlyzko wrote:

> To second what some others have written, there are surely far
> more than 200 peer-reviewed open-access journals. Just in
> mathematics alone there appear to be over 50 (if one merges
> the two lists at <http://www.emis.de/journals/index.html>
> and <http://www.ams.org/mathweb/mi-journals2.html>).

Dear colleagues,

I accept that 200/20,000 (1%) was an under-estimate of the current ratio
of open-access/total peer-reviewed journals!

Let the guesstimate instead be 3000/20,000 (15%) -- or even higher!

But now can I repeat my suggestion that we do need to perform
the finer-grained time-series analysis I sketched, to estimate and
extrapolate the relative size and growth-rate of open-access via BOAI-1
(self-archiving) and via BOAI-2 (open-access journals), within and across
disciplines -- and also to answer the very significant question of where
in the quality-hierarchy the respective open-access growth is occurring.

The clearer picture such an analysis will provide of where the growth
regions are, which way they are growing, and how long they are likely
to take to approach 100% can surely only be helpful to us in planning
our future strategy and deploying our energy and resources.

Stevan Harnad
Received on Sat Dec 21 2002 - 14:38:12 GMT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Dec 10 2010 - 19:46:47 GMT