On 4-Feb-06, at 5:41 PM, Sally Morris (
ALPSP) wrote in the
AmSci Forum:
"In addition to self-archived papers and those in full OA journals, don't forget (a) those in hybrid/optional OA journals (which seem to average around 40 articles p.a) and (b) those in 'Delayed OA Journals'. I and others are currently trying to estimate the latter - over 1m articles from HighWire Press publishers alone (and 0.25m from the first 32 ALPSP members to respond to my enquiry...)"
Lower tolls are preferable to higher tolls, shorter
embargoes are preferable to longer embargoes, longer temporary access is preferable to shorter temporary access, wider access is preferable to narrower access, but Open Access is still Open Access, which means
free, immediate, permanent online access to any would-be user webwide, and not just to those whose institutions can afford the access- tolls of the journal it happens to be published in.
The measure of the percentage of OA is the
percentage of current annual article output that is freely accessible online. The rest is merely measuring
Back Access (BA). BA is welcome, but it is not OA; and not what the research community wants and needs most today. Research uptake, usage, impact and progress do not derive any benefit whatsoever from embargoes, delaying full access and usage. That is not what research is about, or for.
But this is not the publishing community's problem, at all. As long as a journal is green on immediate self-archiving, it has done all it needs to do for OA at this time (i.e., it has not tried to get in OA's way, and in the way of its benefits to research and researchers). The rest is up to the research community now, and they will take care of it -- and not through spontaneous self-archiving alone (just as they do not publish through spontaneous publishing alone).
Systematic Self-Archiving Policy is needed, in the form of self-archiving
mandates by researchers'
institutions and
funders, the other two stake-holders in their joint research output and its impact. Both publishing itself and its citation impact are already linked to professional
rewards, in the form of salary, promotion and research funding. A self-archiving mandate need merely be based on that existing contingency, and the existing publish-or- perish mandate, and designed simply to maximize it.
http://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php
Gold OA publishing is a welcome bonus; so is hybrid "open choice" optional gold. BA is welcome too; but it cannot and should not be reckoned as OA, any more than re-runs should be reckoned as fresh movies, hand-me-downs as fresh fashion, or left-overs as fresh fare.
One of the biggest and most important components of the OA impact advantage, especially in fields that have already reached 100% OA, such as astrophysics, is EA (Early Access). One would think that earlier access merely brings earlier impact, not more impact. But
Michael Kurtz's data shows that EA not only adds a permanent increment to citation counts, but to their continuing growth rate too. It is as if earlier usage branches early, and the branches keep branching and generating more usage and citations. Of course, this will vary with the uptake-latencies, time-constants and turn-around times of each field, but I doubt that progress in any field benefits from, or is even unaffected by, access delays, any more than it is likely to be immune to publication delays.
If a work is worth publishing today, it is worth accessing today, not just in 6 months, 12 months, or still longer. That is what needs to be counted and tallied if we are
tracking the growth of OA today. If we want to maintain a separate tally for BA too, that's fine, but beside the point, because after the fact, insofar as OA and immediate research progress -- research's immediate priority today -- are concerned. BA may be useful to students, teachers and historians, but it is OA that is needed by researchers, today. Researchers are both the providers and the primary users of research: They (and their institutions and funders) are also the ones in the position to provide -- and benefit from -- immediate OA.
Pertinent Prior
AmSci Topic Threads:
Nature 10 September on Public Archiving (1998)
E-Biomed: Very important NIH Proposal (1999)
Floyd Bloom's SCIENCE Editorial about NIH/E-biomed
Evolving APS Copyright Policy (American Physical Society)
Nature's vs. Science's Embargo Policy (2000)
AAAS's Response: Too Little, Too Late (2001)
APS copyright policy (2002)
Open Letter to Philip Campbell, Editor, Nature (2003)
Is there any need for a universal Open Access label?
Shulenburger on open access: so NEAR and yet so far
Nature Web Debate on Open Access (2004)
Elsevier Gives Authors Green Light for Open Access Self-Archiving
URGENT support for NIH public access policy
Critique of Stanford/HighWire Press Critique of NIH Proposal
Nature Back-Slides on Self-Archiving [Corrected] (2005)
Please Don't Copy-Cat Clone NIH-12 Non-OA Policy!
Open Access vs. NIH Back Access and Nature's Back-Sliding
Proposed update of BOAI definition of OA: Immediate and Permanent
Stevan Harnad
