Friends: A few days agoI gave a talk on open access at the Bose Institute, Kolkata (Ultadanga - Salt Lake campus). Afew biologists were very concerned about publishing only in high impact journals and they thought publishers of those journals would not allow authors to self-archive the papers after publication. This afternoon I had lunch with a senior scientist in H'bad and he told me that "most of us are publishing in high impact journals once in a while and if the journal forbids archiving we will not be able to archive." There may be a number of other researchers in India who may share such apprehensions. Here is a message from Stevan Harnad which provides AUTHENTIC information on the actual number of journals that permit author self-archiving. The actual titles of these journals are available at the SHERPA and Romeo sites. All Kluwer journals and all Springer journals, for example, allow author self-archiving (or institutional archiving). Of the 9,214 journals surveyed, 6458 (or 70%) allow archiving of both preprints and post-prints, and 23% allow preprint archiving - making a total of 93% of journals. Please spread the word among all scientists. Thanks and best wishes. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] ---------------------------------- Stevan Harnad in a discussion list In Open Access News, Peter Suber wrote:

I applaud Cambridge's decision to continue to allow immediate OA archiving of peer-reviewed author manuscripts, even when authors choose not to participate in Cambridge Open. That's a step most of the other OA hybrid programs have been unwilling to take. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_08_06_fosblogarchive.html#1155412572...

Actually, Cambridge University Press's commendable Open Access Policy: (1) Green on PREPRINT self-archiving (2) Green on immediate, unembargoed POSTPRINT self-archiving *and* (3) Hybrid Gold (Cambridge Open Option) is optimal, but CUP, now offering Open Option (for 15 of its 186 journals) is not alone or in the minority among Green Publishers! For example, Springer's Open Choice covers Springer's 502 Journals and (I believe) Kluwer's 837 journals, and these journals are all solid GREEN. I will provide the figures in terms of number and percentage of journals rather than in terms of number and percentage of publishers (because some publishers publish 1000+ journals and some publish only one!). (The primary data are from SHERPA-Romeo http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php ; they are recoded at EPrint-Romeo http://romeo.eprints.org/ ): GREEN journals (6458/9214) (70%): Endorse POSTPRINT (G) or both POSTPRINT and PREPRINT (Gg) self-archiving PALE-GREEN journals (2113/9214) (23%): Endorse PREPRINT (g) self-archiving only. GRAY journals (627/9214) (7%): Endorse neither PREPRINT nor POSTPRINT (X) self-archiving The embargoes (1864/9214) (20%) are, as you would expect, and almost by definition, mostly among the PALE-GREEN journals, who only endorse PREPRINT (g) self-archiving: GREEN (Gg + G) journal embargoes: 27/6458 = <1% PALE-GREEN (g) journal embargoes: 1821/2113 = 86% GRAY (X) journal embargoes: 16/627 = 3% Note that the right way to interpret this is that the endorsement of delayed self-archiving is an *advance* over no endorsement of self-archiving at all. So the 14% of PALE-GREEN (g) journals who don't endorse at least delayed postprint self-archiving are in fact *less* progressive than the 86% that do endorse postprint self-archiving after a delay. And of course the 3% of GRAY journals that endorse delayed self-archiving are at least a smidgen more progressive than those who don't endorse self-archiving at all (though two of these -- the Modern Humanities Research Association journals with a 24-month embargo and the 6 Inter Research journals with a *48-month* embargo are a bit of a joke!). A few updates have to be done, however, in both SHERPA-Romeo and EPrints-Romeo, to downgrade the 27 (1%) of the 6458 GREEN (G) journals to GRAY (X), because embargoed self-archiving is definitely *not* Green. Data details, including the minor re-classifications that are needed, appear below. Stevan Harnad ----------------------------------------------------------------- Australian Psychological Society 12 (3, GREEN-Gg) G-->g Royal College of Psychiatrists 12 (5 GREEN-G) 5G-->X **Royal Statistical Society 12 (3 GREEN-X) 3G-->X Society for Endocrinology 12 (3 GREEN-X) 3G-->X *Inter Research 48! (6, GREEN-X) 6G-->X Modern Humanities Research Association 24! (6, GREEN-X) 6G-->X Total 9339 --> 9197 --> 9214 GREEN (G or Gg)6483 69% --> 70% (+1)--> 6484 70% -3 -23 --> 6458 70% PALE-GREEN (g) 2248 24% (-138) = 2110 --> 23% +3 --> 2113 --> 23% GRAY 604 7% (+16)--> 620 7% +23 --> 627 7% Embargoes Total: 1864/9214 = 20% Gg 3 G 1 5 3 3 6 6 = 24 >1% g 1 698 1 47 188 50 9 56 771 = 1821 86% X 16 3% Association of Applied Biologists 12 (1, PALE-GREEN) Blackwell 6/12 (698, PALE-GREEN) Nature Publishing Group 6 (47, PALE-GREEN) Oxford 12/24 (188 PALE-GREEN) University of Chicago Press (some) (50, PALE-GREEN) Yale Law School 12 (9, PALE-GREEN) Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press 12 (56, PALE-GREEN) Taylor & Francis 12/18 (909 -138 = 771 PALE-GREEN: double-counts!) 83 Dekker, 27 Psychology Press, 28, CRC Press ***University of Texas Press (some) (not yet listed) (16, GRAY) ****Biophysical Society ? (1, GREEN) (not yet listed)