Librarians at Georgia State University have posted this excerpt from Crispin Davis' remarks at the Interim 2005 Reed Elsevier Analysts Meeting:
Open Access, is now 8 years in and their total market share remains below 1%. And all the data, the evidence, the research shows that the authors really are not very interested in having their papers published in Open Access journals. Open Archiving, the more we get into this, the more we research it, the more we talk to the scientific community, the more questionable I think the benefits become. Certainly authors have very little interest in open archiving. Less than 5% of authors are interested or are putting their peer review papers on their institutional repositories. The researchers themselves don't like it, for understandable reasons. What a researcher wants is to be able to access 6m, 8m, 10m articles by subject all cross-ref, interlinked to actual language search and individual depositories do exactly the opposite of that. So I think that open archiving increasingly is going to be challenged.
Comment. Davis is wrong on the facts.
On OA journals, submissions are growing and authors who have not submitted work to them are deterred more by ignorance than opposition. According to the July 2004 Swan-Brown study of author attitudes toward OA journals, when "presented with a list of reasons why they have not chosen to publish in an OA journal and asked to say which were important...[t]he reason that scored highest (70%) was that authors were not familiar enough with OA journals in their field."
On OA archiving, far more authors have archived than he thinks, and for those who haven't, there is much less opposition than ignorance. According to the May 2005 Swan-Brown study of author attitudes toward self-archiving: 'Almost half (49%) of the respondent population have self-archived at least one article during the last three years in at least one of the three possible ways — by placing a copy of an article in an institutional (or departmental) repository, in a subject-based repository, or on a personal or institutional website. More people (27%) have so far opted for the last method — putting a copy on a website — than have used institutional (20%) or subject-based (12%) repositories, though the main growth in self-archiving activity over the last year has been in these latter two more structured, systematic methods for providing open access. Use of institutional repositories for this purpose has doubled and usage has increased by almost 60% for subject-based repositories....There is still a substantial proportion of authors unaware of the possibility of providing open access to their work by self-archiving. Of the authors who have not yet self-archived any articles, 71% remain unaware of the option.'
What would Elsevier stock analysts think if they knew the facts?
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/05/2005 09:12:00 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.
