---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sun, 7 Sep 2003 10:10:49 +0530 From: Subbiah Arunachalam <arun@mssrf.res.in> Friends: Should our scientists continue to publish their findings in toll-access journals such as those published by commercial publishers or should they publish their work in toll-free journals such as those published by BioMed Central and the Indian Academy of Sciences? If our scientists want their work read (and cited) by a very large number of people, then they have no choice: they ought to publish their work in toll-free journals. As a corollary, we must make all (worthwhile) Indian journals toll-free by making their electronic versions freely accessible on the Internet. Please read the following message I received from Stevan Harnad, who visited India three years ago and gave talks at Chennai and Bangalore. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] ---- Message from Stevan Harnad The following data posted by Peter Suber in http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html indicate that open-access articles (from BioMedCentral) average at least 89 times as many downloads as toll-access articles (from Elsevier). (The 89 is probably an undercount, because it does not include PubMedCentral downloads.) PETER SUBER: "Elsevier has put some PowerPoint slides on the web summarizing its interim results for 2003. Slide #16 shows that there were 4.5 million full-text articles in ScienceDirect on June 30, 2003, and slide #15 shows that there were 124 million article downloads in the 12 months preceding that date. This means that its articles were downloaded an average of 28 times each during the past year. http://www.investis.com/reedelsevierplc/data/interims2003b.ppt "For comparison I asked Jan Velterop of BioMed Central what the download figure was for BMC articles during the same time period. He reports that the average is about 2500 per year, which doesn't count downloads of the same articles from PubMed Central. This is 89 times the Elsevier number. " Combine these download data with the citebase data on the correlation between downloads and citations http://citebase.eprints.org/analysis/correlation.php and you will be able to estimate the dramatic way in which open access enhances research citation impact, confirming what Steve Lawrence reported in 2001 for computer science research: http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/lawrence.html and what Kurtz et al. reported for astrophysical research: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2829.html (In an ongoing collaboration with Charles Oppenheim we are currently making controlled pairwise comparisons of citation impact between open-access and toll-access articles that appear in the same journal and year, comparing self-archived and non-self-archived articles, across time, and across disciplines. We hope to extend these comparisons with the help of ISI's citation database.) Those individuals, institutions, research-funders, tax-payers and nations who are interested in increasing the visibility, usage and impact of their research output should take special note of these data! Apply the estimates in reverse if you wish to estimate the amount of research impact (and its rewards) being that is currently being *lost* daily, monthly, and yearly by researchers, their institutions, and by research itself as long as we delay providing immediate open access to all research output -- as we could already do today, by self-archiving it. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/che.htm Stevan Harnad