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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-AU link=blue vlink=purple style='word-wrap: break-word;-webkit-nbsp-mode: space;-webkit-line-break: after-white-space'><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>Thanks Stevan. Unfortunately that does not answer the question I posed, but a different question which is not relevant in the research being undertaken to see the adoption of OA practices amongst researchers, as opposed to the application of OA to articles which you have ably handled.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>As you have recognized, it only needs one author of a multi-author article to make the whole paper OA; however as we approach 100%, single-author articles will require that sole author to make his or her paper OA. (The question is irrelevant to Gold OA because all authors jointly agree to make the article OA, once.) It would be an interesting study to see amongst Green OA, whether the rate of making articles OA improves as the number of authors does. Hypothesis A: it will, but not linearly. Secondly one could look at the number of times an article is OA (ie the number of OA copies there are on the Internet). Hypothesis B: this measure should increase with the number of authors, though probably not linearly. Zipf’s law is more likely in these cases as earlier-listed authors are probably the more likely to take OA action. Is your crawled data capable of being re-interpreted this way?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>I propose to do the following:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoListParagraph style='text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l3 level1 lfo3'><![if !supportLists]><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>(1)<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'> </span></span></span><![endif]><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>Estimate the total number of papers P published per year y, Py<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoListParagraph style='text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l3 level1 lfo3'><![if !supportLists]><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>(2)<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'> </span></span></span><![endif]><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>Estimate the average number of authors per paper for this corpus, m.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoListParagraph style='text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l3 level1 lfo3'><![if !supportLists]><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>(3)<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'> </span></span></span><![endif]><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>Compute m x Py = N, an estimate of the number of active researchers.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>The expected errors in N are:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoListParagraph style='text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l1 level1 lfo4'><![if !supportLists]><span style='font-family:Symbol;color:#1F497D'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>·<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'> </span></span></span><![endif]><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>The value of Py is not certain – neither ISI nor Scopus are complete. This leads to an under-estimate.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoListParagraph style='text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l1 level1 lfo4'><![if !supportLists]><span style='font-family:Symbol;color:#1F497D'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>·<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'> </span></span></span><![endif]><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>Not all researchers publish every year. This means that the number of researchers is again under-estimated. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoListParagraph style='text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l1 level1 lfo4'><![if !supportLists]><span style='font-family:Symbol;color:#1F497D'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>·<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'> </span></span></span><![endif]><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>Some researchers publish more than once per year. This is double-counting and results in an over-estimate. ISI or Scopus may be able to provide disambiguated estimates from their databases.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoListParagraph style='text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l1 level1 lfo4'><![if !supportLists]><span style='font-family:Symbol;color:#1F497D'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>·<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'> </span></span></span><![endif]><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>Unfortunately aggregating the number of years causes both the above errors to change – the first reducing, the second increasing. I have seen statements to the effect that an active researcher publishes at least once every three years, so the effective limit is 3 successive years. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>Still, the information will be interesting and perhaps useful. It may be useful to do a pilot study in a single institution. Australian universities have complete citation databases of their publications, so it may be possible to check this type of data for a single institution. If it is a big one, the data may extrapolate.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>Best wishes<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>Arthur<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><div><div style='border:none;border-top:solid #B5C4DF 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0cm 0cm 0cm'><p class=MsoNormal><b><span lang=EN-US style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>From:</span></b><span lang=EN-US style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'> goal-bounces@eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces@eprints.org] <b>On Behalf Of </b>Stevan Harnad<br><b>Sent:</b> Sunday, 1 January 2012 8:52 PM<br><b>To:</b> Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)<br><b>Subject:</b> [GOAL] Re: How many researchers are there?<o:p></o:p></span></p></div></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Some suggestions:<o:p></o:p></p><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal>(1) Estimate the total number of papers P published per year y, Py, rather than the number of researchers.<o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal>(2) Start with the Thompson-Reuters-ISI-indexed (or SCOPUS-indexed) subset.<o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal>(3) For Py, sample the web (Google Scholar) to see what percentage of it is freely available (OA).<o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal>Our latest rough estimate with this method, using a robot, is about 20%.<o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal>(Using estimates of the number of researchers, if the margin of error for the total is 1M - 10M then the margin of error for the percentage OA would be 10% - 100%, which is too big. Using known, published papers as the estimator also eliminates the multi-author problem.)<o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal>Cheers, Stevan<o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><div><div><div><p class=MsoNormal>On 2011-12-31, at 6:25 PM, Arthur Sale wrote:<o:p></o:p></p></div><p class=MsoNormal><br><br><o:p></o:p></p><div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-line-height-alt:10.2pt'><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>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></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-line-height-alt:10.2pt'><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'> <o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-line-height-alt:10.2pt'><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>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></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-line-height-alt:10.2pt'><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'> <o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-line-height-alt:10.2pt'><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>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></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-line-height-alt:10.2pt'><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'> <o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-line-height-alt:10.2pt'><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>That narrows the estimate, rough as it is, to<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-line-height-alt:10.2pt'><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'> 1.1M < no of researchers < 10M<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-line-height-alt:10.2pt'><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>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></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-line-height-alt:10.2pt'><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'> <o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-line-height-alt:10.2pt'><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>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></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-line-height-alt:10.2pt'><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'> <o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-line-height-alt:10.2pt'><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>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></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-line-height-alt:10.2pt'><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'> <o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-line-height-alt:10.2pt'><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Arthur Sale<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-line-height-alt:10.2pt'><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>University of Tasmania, Australia<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-line-height-alt:10.2pt'><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'> <o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-line-height-alt:10.2pt'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'> </span><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p></div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif"'>_______________________________________________<br>GOAL mailing list<br><a href="mailto:GOAL@eprints.org">GOAL@eprints.org</a><br><a href="http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal">http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal</a><o:p></o:p></span></p></div></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div></div></div></body></html>