[GOAL] Re: Puzzled - please help

Wed Nov 7 17:44:32 GMT 2012

Dear Sally,

This has obviously puzzled us as well Yassine and Stevan.

The discrepancies in the green figures are easier to deal with. Since 
Yassine's gold figures are so low and everything else which the robots 
have found is classified as "self-archieved" the hits classified as 
green rise over 20 %. However, in our studies we have further split down 
such copies into further categories. It turns out that part are not 
self-archieved at all but articles in delayed OA journals (the robot 
searches are made with a considerable delay due to the availability of 
meta-data), paid hybrid articles and promotionally free articles in 
subscription journals (many journals seem to make one issue per annum 
free as advertisement). All of these are caught in the same robotized 
net and should be sorted out. In 2011 there were around 83'000 delayed 
OA articles, around 10'000 hybrid article and an unknown number of 
promotional OA articles in ISI journals which together make at least 7-8 %.

The huge discrepancy in the pure gold number is more difficult to 
explain, and the fact that Yassine's study had a more limited number of 
disciplines with equally big samples cannot alone explain it. Their 
numbers show hardly any growth in the gold share in ISI between 2005 and 
2010, when our as we believe very robust method shows a very substantial 
growth (from 6,6 % to 9 % share in ISI between just 2008 and 2011). Also 
their numbers are even lower than the Mc Veight study from 2003, a year 
when BMC and PLoS were just started.

Best regards

Bo-Christer

On 11/6/12 6:41 PM, Sally Morris wrote:
> Can anyone shed light on the following apparent discrepancy:
> Laakso and Bjork (http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/10/124) give 
> a figure for articles published in 2011 and indexed in Scopus - 11% in 
> full Gold journals, 0.7% in hybrid journals, and 5% in 'delayed OA' 
> journals with a delay of no more than 12 months [Stevan may not like 
> the term, but I think the rest of us understand it well enough, so 
> let's not get into that!]
> Gargouri et al (http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1206/1206.3664.pdf), 
> on the other hand, give a figure of just 1.2% articles published in 
> 2010 via Gold OA
> Furthermore, Gargouri et al give the percentage of 2010 articles 
> available via Green OA as 21.9% (2008 articles 20.6%).  Bjork et al 
> (http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0011273) 
> had a very different figure of 11.9% for articles published in 2008.
> I can't get my head round the spectacular difference between the two 
> sets of figures - can someone please explain?  I can't believe that 
> inclusion/exclusion in Scopus can possibly account for it. Am I 
> missing something?
> Thanks
> Sally
> Sally Morris
> South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK BN13 3UU
> Tel:  +44 (0)1903 871286
> Email:  sally at morris-assocs.demon.co.uk

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