Mixing and Matching the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access-Take 2

Serials Review

Volumn 34, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 41-51

  Guédon, Jean Claude ^a  

^a UNIVERSITÉ DE MONTRÉAL   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 43349096254     PISSN: 00987913     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/j.serrev.2007.12.008     Document Type: Article

References (50)

1. Serials Review, Vol. 30 No. 4 (2004). I want to thank my wife, Frances K. Groen, for having helped me write this article in legible English, and for some precious suggestions.
2. See http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml.
3. See http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html.
4. John Willinsky, The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship (Digital Libraries and Electronic Publishing) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
5. See, for example, Robert K. Merton, On Social Structure and Science, ed. Piotr Sztompa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
6. Pierre Bourdieu, "La spécificité du champ scientifique et les conditions sociales du progrèes de la raison," Sociologie et Sociétés 7, no. 1 (1975): 91-118.
7. This famous aphorism, generally translated by "knowledge is power," is found in Meditationes Sacrae (1597).
8. One way to approach this question is to look at the national distributions of top gatekeepers in science publications. Some results have been coming out of the work conducted by Tibor Braun and his collaborators since the 1980s. See a summary of his main results in Tibor Braun, "Keeping the gates of Science Journals" in Handbook of Quantitative Science and Technology Research, Henk Moed, Wolfgang Chenzel, and Ulrich Schmoch, eds. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004), 95-114. On a distinct, but related, question, see Manfred Bonitz, "Ten Years [of] Matthew Effect for Countries," Scientometrics 64, no. 3 (2005): 375-79.
9. The example of Harold Varmus immediately comes to mind.
10. See Sverker Sörlin and Hebe Vessuri, "Introduction: The Democratic Deficit of Knowledge Economies," in Knowledge Society vs. Knowledge Economy (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), pp. 2-32.
11. See on this Derek J. de Solla Price, Little Science, Big Science (New York, Columbia University Press, 1963).
12. See http://www.amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access -Forum.html.
13. Michael Mabe, "The Growth and Number of Journals," Serials Vol. 16, No 2 (July 2003), 191-7. Mabe claims that Derek de Solla Price had estimated there would be a million titles at the end of the twentieth century but this refers only to a linear extrapolation of a growth curve found in Derek J. de Solla Price, Little Science, Big Science (New York, Columbia University Press, 1963). Price cautiously does comments that stricter definitions of scientific publications could shift numbers by one order of magnitude, thus potentially bringing that number down to 100,000 titles.
14. Jack Meadows, Communicating Research (San Diego: Academic Press, 1998), p. 15.
15. Derek de S. Price, op. cit. (note 2), p. 8 and accompanying graph on p. 9.
16. However, to go back to Price's word of caution (see note 2), a stricter definition leading to a result one order of magnitude lower would yield the 24,000 figure often used in OA debates.
17. Eugene Garfield, Citation Indexing. Its Theory and Application in Science, Technology, and Humanities (New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1979), 20. In January of 2004, Eugene Garfield suggested the number of scientific journals in the world would probably stand somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand titles. See http://www.users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3389.html.
18. John P.A. Ioannidis, "Concentration of the Most-Cited Papers in the Scientific Literature: Analysis of Journal Ecosystems", PLoS ONE 1.1 (2006), http://www.dx.doi.org/10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000005 (accessed December 13th 2007).
19. In Ulrich's is, for Michael Mabe, a condition to be a "learned journal." Mabe, op. cit. (note 13), 192.
20. Ulrich's FAQ specifies that "Ulrich's Serials Analysis System is designed for password-protected use by library professionals only, and is not a patron-interface product." See http://www.ulrichsweb.com/ulrichsweb/usasfaq.asp (accessed December 13, 2007).
21. The conflation of academic and trade journals is a little puzzling given the attachment of scientists and scholars to peer review and their desire to separate research papers from other publications as precisely and neatly as possible. Responding to this need, Open J-Gate.
22. Jean-Claude Guédon "In Oldenburg's Long Shadow: Librarians, Research Scientists, Publishers, and the Control of Scientific Publishing," http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/mmproceedings/138guedon.shtml.
23. Scientific American, August 1995. The citation was pulled from the Scientific American web site at http://www.sciamdigital.com/index.cfm?fa=Products.ViewIssuePreview&A RTICLEID_CHAR=082AA6E7-13D1-4610-81F4-EEC68867A24. There was a reply by the Science Citation Index in the form of a letter to the Editor of Scientific American, October 1995, p. 10. See http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/papers/currscience.html#tref6.
24. D.J. Frame. "Problems in the Use of Literature-based S&T Indicators in Developing Countries." In: H. Morita-Lou, ed. Science and Technology Indicators for Development. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1985). 117-22. The quotation is from The Uncertain Quest: Science, Technology, and Development (Paris, United Nations University Press, 1994), Jean-Jacques Salomon, Francisco R. Sagasti, and Céline Sachs-Jeantet and is available on-line at: http://www.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/uu09ue/uu09ue0m.htm. According to S. Arunachalam who attended the ISI meeting, it took place in 1982 and not in 1985. Personal communication from S. Arunachalam, November 4th, 2007.
25. M. Callaham, R.I. Wears and E. Weber, "Journal Prestige, Publication Bias, and Other Characteristics Associated with Citation of Published Studies in Peer-Reviewed Journals," JAMA 287, no. 21 (June 5, 2002): 2849. Some studies disagree with this conclusion, for example, Bhandari M, Busse J, Devereaux PJ, et al., "Factors Associated with Citation Rates in the Orthopedic Literature," Canadian Journal of Surgery, Vol. 50 No. 2 (April 2007), 119-23.
26. Ironically, BIOSIS is now part of Thomson Scientific, which owns SCI.
27. Arunachalam S., and Manorama K. "Are Citation-Based Quantitative Techniques Adequate for Measuring Science on the Periphery?". Scientometrics 15 5-6 (1989) 394
28. One of the more candid arguments in favor of truncating the list of journals is "cost effectiveness" as Garfield explains: "The cost-effective objective of an index is to minimize the cost per useful item identified and to maximize the probability of finding any useful item that has been published.... A cost-effective index must restrict its coverage, as nearly as possible, to only those items that people are likely to find useful." E. Garfield, op. cit. (note 17), p. 20.
29. See http://www.topuniversities.com/worlduniversityrankings/university_rankin gs_news/article/why_scopus/. In passing, the figure of 15,000 titles fits nicely with the results announced by Michael Mabe in the article cited earlier (see note 13). Although Michael Mabe was working for Elsevier when he wrote this article and Scopus is an Elsevier product, the coincidence may be just the result of some pre-established harmony.
30. Eugene Garfield briefly recounts his problems with Maxwell in an interview by Robert V. Williams in July 1997. See http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/papers/history/heritagey1998.html and http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/papers/oralhistorybywilliams.pdf.
31. See Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth, Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), passim.
32. See note 23.
33. There is an even more perverse situation that has been described to me by S. Arunachalam. The late Sambhu Nath De, a cholera investigator based in Calcutta who died in 1985, was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize by no less than Joshuah Lederberg. However, in his own country, he was not even nominated a fellow of any Indian academy. Presumably, cholera was too close to local preoccupations to qualify as a prestigious topic in India and it was too exotic a topic to form the basis for a "universalistic" Nobel Prize. Sic transit gloria mundi.
34. In the United States and in Europe, an "orphan disease" is a rare disease and this means that it touches fewer than 200,000 people. See http://www.rarediseases.info.nih.gov/asp/diseases/diseases.asp. However, the logic is the same as for the poor countries: The relatively small number of patients does not create a sufficient market to stimulate the interest of pharmaceutical companies. Governments, however, may be moved to doing some research for such diseases.
35. It is interesting to see that a journal specifically devoted to neglected tropical diseases has recently been launched by the Public Library of Science, which is to say in Open Access: http://www.plosntds.org/home.action.
36. Spagnolo F. "Brazilian Scientists' Publications and Mainstream Science: Some Policy Implications". Scientometrics 18 3-4 (1990) 205-218
37. Braun T., and Dióspatonyi I. "The Counting of Core Journal Gatekeepers as Science Indicators Really Counts. The Scientific Scope of Action and Strength of Nations,". Scientometrics 62 3 (2005) 297-319
38. Tibor Braun, op. cit. (note 8), p. 109.
39. Manfred Bonitz, op. cit. (note 8). The author simply documents the fact that, in general, citations received stand below the expected level but for a minority of countries, the reverse is true. Coupling Bonitz' observation with Braun's remarks about the distribution of gatekeepers should bring us closer to an etiology of the phenomenon.
40. Abel L. Packer and Rogerio Meneghini, "Learning to Communicate Science in Developing Countries," Interciencia 32, no. 9 (September 2007): 643-47. The whole SciELO project now present in about ten countries, including Spain and Portugal in Europe, is a concerted effort to move beyond the obstacles inhibiting the development of autonomous scientific capability in developing countries. See below for more on SciELO.
41. E. Garfield, "Mapping Science in the Third World," Science and Public Policy (June 1983): 112-27, in particular p. 114.
42. This means "failure to earn." It is a calculation that works on hypothetical grounds: Had the following been true, I would have benefited by so much. Given that I did not earn as much, I failed to earn something. This something is the manque à gagner.
43. To write this article, I have had to read a number of articles from the journal Scientometrics. The language of some of the articles is simply atrocious, even to a non-native English speaker like myself, which shows that the editorial input is essentially absent. Likewise, the extremely costly volume cited in note 8 and published by Kluwer incorporates articles written in unacceptable English. In short, the claim for "added value" through editing often appears vacuous not to say more. On this topic, see also http://www.mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/4026.html.
44. See http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/.
45. See http://www.listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A2=ind04&L=american-scie ntist-open-access-forum&F=l&P=72202.
46. See http://www.scielo.org/index.php?lang=en.
47. On the Chinese Science Citation Index, see Loet Leydesdorff and Jin Bihul, "Mapping the Chinese Science Citation Database in Terms of Aggregated Journal-Journal Citation Relations," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 56, no. 14 (2005): 1469-79.
48. For the "Open Journal System," itself part of the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), see http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs.
49. See Abel L. Packer, "The SciELO Model for Electronic Publishing and Measuring of Usage and Impact of Latin American and Caribbean Scientific Journals," available in Google Scholar at the following URL: http://www.scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=fr&client=firefoxa&rls= com.ubuntu:fr:official&hs=6NV&q=author:%22Packer%22+intitle:%22T he+SciELO+Model+for+electronic+publishing+and+measuring+...%22+&um=1 &ie=UTF-8&oi=scholarr.
50. See http://blogdokura.blogspot.com/ or, for a slightly different presentation, http://kuramoto.wordpress.com/. Helio Kuramoto has been a very active force behind this law. He has organized a petition in favor of this law: http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?PL1120.