Peter Suber, Open access, impact, and demand: Why some authors self archive their articles, BMJ, May 14, 2005. An editorial commenting on Jonathan Wren's April 12 article, Open access and openly accessible. Excerpt: 'One way that Wren summarises his conclusion needs some elaboration. He says, "Decentralised sharing of scientific reprints through the internet creates a degree of de facto open access that, though highly incomplete in its coverage, is none the less biased towards publications of higher popular demand." This is accurate but may leave the impression that most high demand articles are open access somewhere, when all we know so far is that most open access articles in the set he studied were high demand. It's possible that the vast majority of high demand articles are not yet open access, and indeed this seems likely. Most publishing scientists do not yet self archive their work and their reasons seem entirely unrelated to the demand, impact, or quality of their work --that is, they know too little about self archiving or believe they are too busy. This is important because we ought to use Wren's results to understand why authors self archive and how to appeal to authors who don't. One lesson is that existing open access is demand driven to some degree. But this doesn't mean there is little or no unmet demand. On the contrary, unmet demand may be the norm, just as the sale of food is demand driven while the unmet demand exists in catastrophic proportions.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/13/2005 09:31:00 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.
