I agree with you that articles would be a far more
meaningful
statistic than journals. However, I would refine that
further:
it's the number of high quality articles that matters,
whether
one defines quality by downloads, citations, or some other
metric. I don't think the data are there to say whether OA
is a
rising tide by any of those measures, as Heather first
asserted.
Also, what is an "open access article?" By the
criteria of one of
the OA manifestos, a journal like Diabetes Care is not OA.
However, Diabetes Care makes more highly cited clinical
diabetes
research freely available than any other
endocrinology/metabolism
journal. I frankly think its policy of making content freely
available after 3 months is a more meaningful contribution
of
expanded access to scientific information than the many OA
optional plans floating around. So is Diabetes Care evidence
of
the rising tide of OA--or an indication OA, as defined in
Berlin
or Bethesda or wherever, really isn't needed? What exactly
is OA?
Peter Banks
Publisher
American Diabetes Association
Email: pbanks diabetes.org
>>> mattbiomedcentral.com 04/12/06 8:12 PM
>>>
"I don't think the data show that open access
continues to grow
dramatically, not in medicine at least"
There are a several reasons that a year by year analysis of
the
DOAJ, is not really suitable as a metric for the growth of
OA.
Firstly, as has been discussed recently on this list, the
DOAJ
does not list the year that a journal went open access.
Rather
(as I understand it) it lists the first year for which OA
content
is available from the journal concerned. As such, any
journals
which have converted to open access, rather than starting as
open
access journals, are assigned to the wrong year in the
analysis
below, underestimating the number of journals going OA in
recent
years, and overestimating the number of OA journals launched
in
the past.
(2) The number of open access journals is in any case an
poor
proxy for the overall growth of open access publishing.
BioMed
Central launched 50+ titles in the year 2000 (contributing
to an
apparent peak in new open access journals in that year).
That is
the most journals BioMed Central ever launched in a single
year.
So did we "peak" in 2000? Hardly. BioMed Central
published 5586
peer reviewed open access articles in 2005, compared to 224
in
2000 - a 25-fold increase, and we continue to see very
strong
year on year growth.
(3) Looking a the number of journals in the DOAJ fails to
account
for the growing take up of optional open access (e.g. as
practiced by PNAS et al.) and also fails to distinguish
between
huge open access journals (like NAR) and tiny ones.
A better approach would be to analyse the number of
immediate
open access articles published year on year. This is
challenging
to do, not least because several years on it is very
difficult to
be sure what *was* open access at the moment of publication.
But
that is really the metric that counts.
Matthew Cockerill, Ph.D.
Publisher
BioMed Central ( http://www.biomedcentra
l.com/ )
bond, UK
Email: mattbiomedcentral.com
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