[GOAL] Re: One way to expand the OA movement: be more inclusive

[Bo-Christer Björk]

Dear all,

I agree with Heather that we should take a more inclusive approach to 
Open Access. For most ordinary academics and non-academics all that 
counts is getting access to particular articles they want to read that 
more often than not are identified via references.

The landscape is not black and white. Most of Green OA for reasons of 
embargoes and author behavior is delayed OA.

In a study we made a couple of years ago (Delayed Open Access – an 
overlooked high-impact category of openly available scientific literature
Mikael Laakso and Bo-Christer Björk)  we estimated that of the citations 
(not cited articles) in Web of Knowledge in the last available year:

80 % pointed to articles in closed subscription journals (of which some 
may be found as green copies)

6 % pointed to articles in immediate OA journals

14 % pointed to articles in delayed OA journals with embargo periods of 
max 12 months. This is due to the fact that many of the some 500 delayed 
OA journals that we found were high volume and impact.

The figures might look a bit different today but the overall picture is 
the same. To me it is clear that the reading of scholarly articles that 
you track via citations is a very important part of the all reading of 
scholarly articles.

Bo-Christer Björk