Mixing and Matching the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access—Take 2 | E-LIS. E-prints in Library and Information Science

References

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. openarchi ves. org/ OAI/ openarchi vesprotocol .
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 Aca-
demic 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&ARTICLEID_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 ScienticLibrary.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. S. Arunachal am and K. Manorama, “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_rankings_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 nomi ated 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. F. Spagnolo, “Brazilian Scientists’ Publications and Mainstream
Science: Some Policy Implications”, Scientometrics 18 (3–4)
(1990): 205–218.
37. Tibor Braun and Ildikó Dióspatonyi, “The Counting of Core
Journal Gatekeepers as Science Indicators Really Counts. The
Scientific Scope of Action and Strength of Nations,” Sciento-
metrics 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 Commu-
nicate 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-scientist-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:of ficial&hs=6NV&q=author:%22Packer%22+intitle:%22The+SciELO+Model+for +electronic+publ ishing+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.