[GOAL] Re: Elsevier's query re: "positive things from publishersthat should be encouraged, celebrated, recognized"

[Bo-Christer Björk]

Dear All,

I've been following this debate with interest from the sidelines for a 
few days. As some of you may have noticed our research has in the last 
couple of years been focused on providing empirical facts about OA. Here 
are a few very recent findings.

Hybrid OA is a failure, the main reason being the almost uniform 3000 
USD price level which can be contrasted with an average of around 900 
USD calculated over around 100,000 APC OA articles published in 2010. 
The uptake of hybrid was around 13,000 articles in 2011 over more than 
4,000 journals, meaning an uptake of 1-2% of eligible article and less 
than 1 % of the global article volume.

Gold OA published in DOAJ registered journals has continued growing at 
around 20 % per annum in 2010 and 2011 and the number of articles in 
2011 was an estimated 330,000. The share of all SCOPUS or all ISI 
articles is also rapidly rising and approaching 10 %.

The average quality level of OA journal articles in terms of citations 
received can be compared for journals indexed in either ISI or Scopus 
using impact factors (for Scopus the equivalent in the scimago site). 
While the global average "citedness" of all OA journal articles is 
around 70 % compated to toll-access journals the difference dissappears 
when comparing journals founded after 2000 or journals in say 
biomedicine published in the major industrial countries.

We haven't done much research concerning green OA but I have to note one 
thing. It might certainly be true that mandates raise the level of 
uploading from 15 % to say 60-70 % but what counts is not the number of 
institutions or funders with mandates but what share of the total global 
article volume their mandates cover. In Finland there are 30 institutes 
with mandates, which looks very impressive, but only two have real 
significance, Universities of Helsinki and Tampere, the rest are 28 
regionally based "polytechniques" the teachers of which rarely publish 
article of broader global interest.

So the evidence seems to show that gold (excluding hybrid) is growing 
quite rapidly, whereas I'm not aware of any research showing similar 
growth rates for green in recent years.

Bo-Christer Björk

References:

Björk, Bo-Christer, Solomon, David, 2012, Open Access versus 
subscription journals – A comparison of scientific impact, submitted to 
BMC medicine

Björk, Bo-Christer, 2012. The hybrid model for open access publication 
of scholarly articles – a failed experiment? Accepted for publishing 
March 2012, Journal of the American Society of Information Sciences and 
Technology,
OA copy at http://www.openaccesspublishing.org/hybrid/index.php

Solomon, David, Björk, Bo-Christer, 2011. A study of Open Access 
Journals using article processing charges. Accepted for publishing 
February 2012, Journal of the American Society for Information Science 
and Technology, OA copy at http://www.openaccesspublishing.org/apc2/

Laakso M, Welling P, Lovasz-Bukvova, H, Nyman L, Björk B-C, Hedlund T. 
2011. The Development of Open Access Journal Publishing from 1993 to 
2009, PLoS ONE 6(6): e20961. , 13.6.2011, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0020961