[Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)

[David Goodman]

I've been involved with open  access journals  as a professional
activity from the start of the movement, long before I joined
Wikipedia. There has been only limited success.  Though there are
almost ten thousand open access journals, 95% of them are either very
small or very unimportant, and  in almost all fields of study, none or
almost none of the important journals are open access:

No important journals at all in chemistry are open access,
Almost none in physics
Almost none in geology
Almost none in ecology & evolution
A few in molecular & cell biology
A few only in biomedical sciences
None in psychology
Almost none in the social sciences or the humanities
Almost none in engineering and applied science
A few in medicine

There are only two major open access publishers with high quality
journals: BMC, some of whose many journals are high quality, and PLOS,
all of whose are, but there are only a few of them.
Not a single one of the major university presses are open access,
except for one or two journals
None of the major scientific society publishers are open access,
With the sole exception of BMC, none of the commercial publishers are
open access, except for one or two journals

The major bright spot is the insistance of the NIH and other granting
agencies, that articles for research they sponsor published since
about 2008 be made open access 6 or 12 months after publication. Very
few of the journals that do this have extended the open access
earlier.

At this point, there is no academic field of study whatsoever where an
adequate article could be written using only open access material.
This is of course a very limiting thing for access to information not
just for us, but for the world in general, and the WMF projects should
certainly cooperate  as closely as possible with the forces working
for open access, but the suggestion that it is possible to limit to or
even prefer open acces material is incompatible with the policy on
using the best available sources.


On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 1:53 PM, Melissa Hagemann <MHagemann at sorosny.org> wrote:

>
> In general, access to academic journals is extremely expensive and
> usually only possible for those affiliated with universities.  However
> there is an alternative.  There are now over 6,000 peer-reviewed open
> access journals which are freely available online (www.doaj.org) and
> over 1,800 academic repositories where authors deposit copies of their
> research articles (www.opendoar.org).  This is the result of the open
> access movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access_(publishing)
> which advocates for public access to publicly funded research.
>
> Hopefully the research which is being made available through open access
> can help to support the work of the community.
>
> Melissa
>
>
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-- 
David Goodman

DGG at the enWP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG
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