Michael J. Kurtz and seven co-authors, The NASA Astrophysics Data System: Sociology, Bibliometrics, and Impact, preprint of an article submitted to The Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. From the abstract: "The NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), along with astronomy's journals and data centers, has developed a distributed on-line digital library which has become the dominant means by which astronomers search, access and read their technical literature. By combining data from the text, citation, and reference databases with data from the ADS readership logs we have been able to create Second Order Bibliometric Operators, a customizable class of collaborative filters which permits substantially improved accuracy in literature queries. Using the ADS usage logs along with membership statistics from the International Astronomical Union and data on the population and gross domestic product (GDP) we develop an accurate model for world-wide basic research where the number of scientists in a country is proportional to the GDP of that country, and the amount of basic research done by a country is proportional to the number of scientists in that country times that country's per capita GDP."
In a posting today to the AmSci forum (not yet archived) author Michael Kurtz says that Section 9 of this paper shows that "the entire cost of the journals is tiny compared with the efficiencies gained by having full electronic access to the literature in a discipline. In astronomy, where essentially every professional astronomer has had total electronic access to the entire journal literature for five or six years, the value of that access, in terms of increased efficiencies of research, is about twenty times the total production cost of the core journals."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/25/2003 11:59:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
