I have an associated question: does anyone have any figures, or at least an educated guess, as to how the self-archived papers break down by subject area? In particular, is there perhaps an over-representation of scientific and technical papers as compared with medical (if one can make that distinction). I ask because I am curious as to whether the Wolters Kluwer decision to sell Wolters Kluwer Academic Publishing (scientific and technical) but retain their medical business (especially Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins), and indeed invest more in their Health division, is in any way related to self-archiving trends. Some have speculated that their decision to sell was partly influenced by self archiving, but this is just speculation at present (and I have as yet not managed to speak to anyone at the company). Nevertheless, the question arises: does WK's decision to sell scientific and technical but retain medical suggest that there are some impediments to self-archiving medical papers (be it only greater reluctance for researchers in those areas to self-archive). I guess a similar sort of question arises over the decision to sell the BertelsmannSpringer business: does it publish in areas most threatened by self-archiving?
Any thoughts/facts appreciated. Richard Poynder Freelance Journalist Phone: + 44 (0)191-386-0072 Mobile: 0793-202-4032 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.richardpoynder.com -----Original Message----- From: September 1998 American Scientist Forum [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Imre Simon Sent: 30 October 2002 18:55 To: [email protected] Subject: How many papers are there in the OAI-compliant archives? Hi, I am new to this list and please forgive me if my question has a well known answer. I would like to interest some people (and some Institutions too) in Brazil to start self-archiving their work. It would be helpful to have some statistics about the dimensions of the OAI-compliant archives and at what rate are they growing? What is the proportion of the papers whose full text is also available? Do these statistics exist, and where are they? So far I couldn't find them. In case they do not exist, what would be the most interesting numbers to measure? Don't you think that it would be wise to document the evolution of the dimensions of the OAI-compliant library while everybody is sweating to climb the mountain? Thanks in advance, Imre Simon
