Date: Sat, 8 May 2004 05:58:07 +0100 (BST) From: "[iso-8859-1] Subbiah Arunachalam"

Friends:

Here is a brief exchange betwen Gene garfield and Stevan Harnad. Enjoy reading it.

Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam]

[Moderator's Note: To save iterations, my reply follows below, immediately after Gene's posting -- S.H.]

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Stevan Harnad wrote:

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The rate of new OA journal start-ups is not likely to increase substantially, because the literature is already journal-saturated, and there are few new journal niches. Most OA journal growth is hence likely to come from the conversion of existing TA (toll-access) journals to OA, in one of three ways: (1) The journal remains TA, but makes its online version OA. (2) The journal abandons the TA cost-recovery model and adopts the OA (author-end) cost-recovery model. (3) The journal's editorial board and authorship -- hence, effectively, its title -- defect to an OA publisher.

I am surprised to hear you say this Steve. It flies in the face of experience. You should re-read Derek Price's statements about the growth of invisible colleges.

http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/lilscibi.html

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The latest techniques in publishing make it all

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more likely that new journal start ups of all kinds will continue to occur. I have known dozens of pioneering editors who started new journals because they could not get a professional society or a private publisher to act. Ironically it made several of them quite wealthy because neither the slow moving societies or the conservative publishers could not foresee the potential.

At one time the president of Gordon and Breach told me he could start a journal with 50 subscribers. And Robert Maxwell jumped in to publish journals like Tetrahedron because he could find a brilliant editor.

Today any free spirit could start a new journal. Some will fail and some will succeed. The process of "twigging" as it was once called is inevitable.

Eugene Garfield

[Stevan Harnad's reply: I defer to Gene Garfield's far broader knowledge and experience on the subject of new journal start-ups (though it would be nice to see the actual data on new journal start-ups for, say, the past 20 years, perhaps subdivided in terms of hybrid vs. online-only -- as well, of course, as a count of how many journals, new and old, hybrid and online-only, went belly-up within the same period, after what interval). My

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however, was about OA (Open Access) journal start-ups. Around 1000 journals (5%) out of a total of about 24,000 journals are OA journals today, and the question was about how quickly that *percentage* can be expected to rise (via either new journal creation or old journal conversion or both). I hold by my prediction that it will be very slow, whereas self-archiving, which is already at around 20% right now, can rise to include at least all the articles in the 83% of journals that have already given self-archiving the official green light, or even to 100%, virtually overnight. I think the

the point, potential

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growth rates via these two roads -- gold and green -- differ by at least an order of magnitude. -- S.H.]

------------ Eugene Garfield, PhD. email garfield@codex.cis.upenn.edu tel 215-243-2205 fax 215-387-1266 President, The Scientist www.the-scientist.com Chairman Emeritus, ISI www.isinet.com home page: www.eugenegarfield.org Past President, American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) www.asis.org

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