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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-AU link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal>I am trying to get a rough estimate of the number of active researchers in the world. Unfortunately all the estimates seem to be as rough as the famous Drake equation for calculating the number of technological civilizations in the universe: in other words all the factors are extremely fuzzy. I seek your help. My interest is that this is the number of people who need to adopt OA for us to have 100% OA. (Actually, we will approach that sooner, as the average publication has more than one author and we need only one to make it OA.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>To share some thinking, let me take Australia. In 2011 it had 35 universities and 29,226 academic staff with a PhD. Let me assume that this is the number of research active staff. The average per institution is 835, and this spans big universities down to small ones. Australia produces according to the OECD 2.5% of the world’s research, so let’s estimate the number of active researchers in the world (taking Australia as ‘typical’ of researchers) as 29226 / 0.025 = 1,169,040 researchers in universities. Note that I have not counted non-university research organizations (they’ll make a small difference) nor PhD students (there is usually a supervisor listed in the author list of any publication they produce).<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Let’s take another tack. I have read the number of 10,000 research universities in the world bandied about. Let’s regard ‘research university’ as equal to ‘PhD-granting university’. If each of them have 1,000 research active staff on average, then that implies 10000 x 1000 = 10,000,000 researchers.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>That narrows the estimate, rough as it is, to<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal> 1.1M < no of researchers < 10M<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>I can live with this, as it is only one power of ten (order of magnitude) between the two bounds. The upper limit is around 0.2% of the world’s population.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Another tactic is to try to estimate the number of people whose name appeared in an author list in the last decade. Disambiguation of names rears its ugly head. This will also include many non-researchers in big labs, some of them will be dead, and there will be new researchers who have just not yet published, but I am looking for ball-park figures, not pinpoint accuracy. I haven’t done this work yet.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Can we do better than these estimates, in the face of different national styles? It is even difficult to get one number for PhD granting universities in the US, and as for India and China @$#!<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Arthur Sale<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>University of Tasmania, Australia<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%'><o:p> </o:p></span></p></div></body></html>