Interesting document by Thomson Scientific, Thanks Venkatesh for sharing it with the group. The following para is worth noting: "The evolving environment of scholarly publishing includes additional avenues for making content openly available. Our findings suggest that over 55% of the journals and over 65% of the articles indexed in Web of Science in 2003 are produced by publishers who permit some form of self-archiving, and could be made OA by author archiving." The data studied in the document is of 2003. I hope the figure (65%) of the articles indexed in Web of Science that can be self-archived by authors might have improved by now. According to ROMEO Project < http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php > 93% of the journals surveyed by them allow some form of author archiving. Even if we go by the Web of Science 2003 figures, it can be concluded that 65% of the best articles can be made OA by self-archiving. And the beauty is that it does not matter where on the earth these are archived, OAI-PMH protocol will ensure their universal discovery and access. Just like libraries are essential for teaching / research institutes - OA Repositories should also be must to reflect institutional / country's intellectual output. Yes - OA Repositories are no substitute to journals - but stores them - just like libraries hold books / journals. Now, let us decide what we should be doing in this matter? --Sukhdev Singh, NIC. http://openmed.nic.in On 26/05/06, LS Venkatesh <venkatesh@edutech.com> wrote:

Dear friends:

While on the subject of OA journals, I thought that those who are interested in this topic will find the white paper on "The Impact of Open Access Journals" by Thomson Scientific very useful. The whitepaper, though published in 2004, is available at the following link and could give some very interesting insight into the evolution of OA journals, the trends, impact factor of OA journals and importantly, the lead from Asia Pacific, contrary to usual western dominance.

http://www.thomsonscientific.com/media/presentrep/essayspdf/openaccesscitati...

Hope you will find it useful.

Regards,

Venkatesh -----------

Venkatesh L S General Manager Edutech India Pvt Ltd 8, Khader Nawaz Khan Road Chennai 600 006, India Tel: +91 44 28330999 Fax: +91 44 28331777 GSM: + 91 98403 21214 www.edutechindia.com "Enhancing knowledge and skills for success, lifelong."