As long as we're making corrections on Stephen Pincock's article in the
Scientist ("Tool allows open-access search")
http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20040607/01/
Stephen cites me as follows:
"It's thought that the approximately 1200 OA journals currently
available make up about 5% of all scholarly journals, Harnad said.
Another 15% allows authors to deposit their articles in OA archives,
meaning altogether that articles from about 20% of journals are
available in OA of some description."
That the 1200 OA journals are 5% of all peer-reviewed journals is
correct. That there is 15% OA self-archiving is also correct. But that 15%
of journals "allows (sic) authors" to self-archive is incorrect. (Stephen
goes on to correct this later by stating, correctly, that it is 80% of
journals that have given their green light so far.) It is also incorrect
that 20% of journals are availaible in OA: It is 20% of *articles*
(i.e., 5% + 15%) for which OA has so far been provided. Just 80%
left to go...
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Romeo/romeosum.html
Stevan Harnad
On Mon, 7 Jun 2004, Peter Suber wrote:
> In an article in today's issue of _The Scientist_ Stephen Pincock quotes me
> on the benefits of article-level searching now offered by the DOAJ. See
> his article at
>http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20040607/01>> He quotes me accurately and I'm happy with the result. But some of you
> might think that one of the quotations is inflammatory, so I'm taking this
> opportunity to explain and elaborate.
>> Pincock quotes me as follows:
>> >There's a common misunderstanding that making content open access
> >maximizes its visibility and usefulness. It doesn't. Open access brings
> >us to a major plateau of visibility and usefulness, but it's closer to the
> >minimum than the maximum of what we should expect in the digital age.
>> Did I mean that OA is not as useful or important as I've been saying all
> these years? Not at all. I only meant that once content is OA, we can
> still do a lot to make it even more visible and useful. DOAJ article-level
> searching is a good example. By making a large number of OA articles
> searchable from the same box, and omitting all other content, it creates
> efficiencies that will definitely help researchers. Although the articles
> are already OA, this service will enhance their visibility in two ways: by
> making them easier to find, and by attracting researchers to a place where
> they are to be found.
>> Here are some other examples of improving the visibility and usefulness of
> content that is already OA:
>> * The decision by a university (or PubMed Central) to make its OA
> repository interoperable with other OA repositories through the OAI
> metadata harvesting protocol
>> * Elsevier's decision to index arXiv and other OA content in Scirus
>> * EBSCO's decision to aggregate OA journals alongside conventional journals
>> * The decision by most OA journals to offer email-based current awareness
>> * The Public Library of Science's decision to use Creative Commons
> machine-readable licenses
>> * BioMed Central's decision to use RSS feeds to supplement web-based
> dissemination
>> * Yahoo and Google's decisions to start indexing OAI-compliant repositories
>> One of the primary benefits of OA is that it makes OA literature available
> for all kinds of further processing --for searching, indexing, mining,
> alerting, summarizing, translating, and connecting. There are no limits to
> these enhancements except the limits on intelligent software. OA is one of
> the first steps on this journey, the precondition of most of the rest, not
> the final destination.
>> OA is only the destination in the sense that once we provide it, we can
> take a well-earned rest, knowing that others can come along later and add
> new layers of usefulness retroactively, without asking anyone's permission,
> whenever they have a good idea and figure out how to implement it.
>> As I put it in October 2002,
>> >In this sense, the true promise of [open access] is not that scientific
> >and scholarly texts will be free and online for reading, copying,
> >printing, and so on, but that they will be available as free online data
> >for software that acts as the antennae, prosthetic eyeballs, research
> >assistants, and personal librarians of all serious researchers.
>http://ts.mivu.org/default.asp?show=article&id=1025>> Peter
>>>>> ----------
> Peter Suber
> Research Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College
> Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge
> Author, SPARC Open Access Newsletter
> Editor, Open Access News blog
>http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/>peter.suber at earlham.edu>>
