DEPARTMENT
Letter to the Editor
by Hugh McKellar
The Politics of Open Access
[This letter was inspired by a recent article in USA
TODAY by Dan Vergano; http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2003-11-19-journals-usat_x.htm.]
Today, there are 24,000 research journals (across
all disciplines and languages, worldwide) that publish
about 2.5 million articles per year. There are currently
about 600 open-access journals (http://www.doaj.org)
that publish about 75,000 articles per year. So what
about access to the 2.4 million articles for which there
exists no suitable open-access journal? Should researchers
wait for 23,400 more open-access journals to be created
one by one? It's likely to be a long, long wait!
Yet, there is another way to provide open access,
and that is for the authors of those 2.4 million articles
in those 23,400 journals to self-archive them on their
own institution's Web site. That will make them all
open access overnight.
Each year, there are already three times as many articles
that are made open access through self-archiving than
through open-access publishing. And 55 percent of the
24,000 journals, though not yet ready to take the risk
of becoming open-access journals, are ready to serve
the interests of research and researchers by formally
supporting self-archiving by their authors. Many of
the remaining 45 percent of journals will also agree
if asked.
So why are we talking only about open-access journals,
instead of providing open access to at least 1.2 million
more articles a year? The longer we wait, the longer
and bigger will be our growing daily, weekly, monthly,
and yearly loss of research impact because of access-denial
to would-be users worldwide (a 336-percent impact loss,
according to Lawrence in Nature 2001).
This represents a needless cumulative loss of research
progress and productivity for researchers, their institutions,
their funders, and ultimately for the taxpayers who
fund the funders.
(For more information and a slide show, go to http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/openaccess.htm.)
—Stevan Harnad
Centre de Neuroscience
de la Cognition (CNC)
Université du Québec
à Montréal
Montreal, Quebec
|
