[Forwarding reply from Yvette Diven of Bowker's: 24,000 is apparently the total number of peer-reviewed journals covered (as determined by Ulrich's/Bowker criteria that are not described here) and 18,000 is apparently the number that are self-decsribed by the publisher as "academic/scholarly". (One wonders what might be the subject matter of the 6,000 peer-reviewed journals that are *not* self-designated as academic/scholarly: Possibly pure and applied research?) -- SH]
---------- Forwarded message ---------- List-Post: goal@eprints.org List-Post: goal@eprints.org Date: Thu, 4 Sep 2003 12:46:43 -0400 From: "Diven, Yvette" <yvette.diven AT bowker.com> To: "Stevan Harnad" <harnad AT ecs.soton.ac.uk> Subject: Re: Request for journal/article/field statistics from Ulrichs and ISI Professor Harnad, In reading through the string of emails, I think I can clarify the issue of differing counts from Ulrich's. It appears that the counts are being derived in different ways, using different search criteria in ulrichsweb.com (www.ulrichsweb.com), and that information intended for users of Ulrich's Serials Analysis System (www.ulrichsweb.com/analysis) is being used to define content in ulrichsweb.com. Ulrich's, the database, supports both products and the underlying content and counts in both products are from Ulrich's. Ulrichsweb.com is designed to be a library staff/patron/faculty interface product. Ulrichsweb.com contains bibliographic information on approximately 250,000 periodicals -- active, forthcoming, suspended, and ceased. There are approximately 175,000 active status periodicals in Ulrich's -- including journals, magazines, newspapers, bulletins, monographic series, and newsletters. If one searches ulrichsweb.com for active-status refereed publications of all types, the search result is 24,165 (today's total reflecting the last weekly update of ulrichsweb.com). A search on active-status refereed "academic/scholarly" publications yields a total of 18,788 publications. The designation of "academic/scholarly" is assigned to a periodical by its publisher, based on a list of designations in use in Ulrich's. There is another small group of 58 records flagged in the Ulrich's database as active that are currently being researched for address confirmation. I believe it is those 58 records that constitute the difference between the "18,846 refereed active academic/scholarly serials" referenced in an email in the string below and the search I have just run this morning. The "FAQ" that is mentioned is the list of frequently asked questions about Ulrich's Serials Analysis System. That product is designed to be a collection evaluation tool for library professionals - it is not a patron-access interface product like ulrichsweb.com. The "Ulrich's Universe" and "Ulrich's Core" defined in the FAQ refer to the baselines of comparative measurement that Ulrich's Serials Analysis System makes available. Libraries use Ulrich's Serials Analysis System to compare their library's holdings against (1) all active-status titles in the Ulrich's database and/or (2) a selected subset of approximately 50,000 "core" titles that includes academic/scholarly titles, refereed titles, major consumer and trade titles, and recommended titles. The Ulrich's Core, as it is used in Ulrich's Serials Analysis System includes the 41,000+ active-status academic/scholarly titles pulled from Ulrich's; that total includes refereed academic/scholarly titles, but does not consists wholly of refereed titles. I hope that this information helps clarify the counts. If there are other questions, please let me know. Kind Regards, - Yvette Yvette Diven Director, Product Management, Serials R.R. Bowker LLC 630 Central Avenue New Providence, NJ 07974 Local Office Phone: 415.861.3080 Email: yvette.diven AT bowker.com Web: www.ulrichsweb.com -----Original Message----- From: Stevan Harnad [mailto:harnad AT ecs.soton.ac.uk] Sent: Thursday, September 04, 2003 7:00 AM To: BOAI Forum Subject: Re: Request for journal/article/field statistics from Ulrichs and ISI > On Thu, 4 Sep 2003, Gerritsma, Wouter wrote: > We ought to get the numbers straight. You used to quote 20,000 peer > reviewed journals, based on Ulrich. Correct. That was the (rounded-off) figure I was given by Ulrich's a few years ago. The new (exact) figure from Ulrich's is 24,116 (see reply from Yvette Diven, below). I again rounded it off: 24,000 http://www.ulrichsweb.com/ulrichsweb/analysis/ > Using Ulrichsweb I made a quick check > (this morning), and only found 18,846 refereed active academic/scholarly > serials. I can't see why you increased your quote on the number of > serials to 24,000 today, the FAQ you refered to comes with other > figures altogether: There seem to be several different ways of estimating total refereed journals in Ulrichs. Web queries give one outcome; a direct query to Ulrich's another. (Perhaps Yvette can clarify?) > Q What does the "Ulrich's Core" consist of? > A The "Ulrich's Core" consists of approximately 50,000 active titles > that represent academic and scholarly journals, refereed serials, > titles reviewed in Katz's Magazines for Libraries, and major consumer > and trade publications. http://www.ulrichsweb.com/ulrichsweb/analysis/ I don't know about "Ulrich's Core" but I think Ulrich's total serials coverage is closer to 200,000. A recent reply from Gene Garfield, by the way, refers to total of about 15,000 refereed *scientific* journals worldwide, of which ISI indexes about half (the core?). GARFIELD: "The key to all this is a proper definition of a journal and it varies all over the lot. I think 15,000 scientific journals is good enough. ISI covers half of these which means that they are covering about 75% of the... probably 1.5 million [articles published] worldwide" Garfield also uses 100 articles as his rounded-off estimate of the average number of articles per journal (ISI's current exact figure is about 107, and higher for science than for non-science). That would mean, roughly, 24,000 x 100 = about 2.5 million refereed articles annually (again rounding off for simplicity). > It is hard to believe that the major consumer and trade publications > consist of more than half of "Ulrich's core" I can't follow any of that. I am interested only in estimating the total number of refereed journals, both scientific and scholarly. > So how many peer reviewed scholarly publications are out there? Somewhere in the vicinity of 24K still sounds right, and about 2.5 million articles annually. The purpose of soliciting these data was in order to estimate what proportion of the annual 2.5 million refereed-journal articles is open-access because it appears in open-access journals, what proportion is open-access because it is self-archived by its authors, and how quickly open-access is growing via these two complementary routes: There are 500 (low-end estimate -- http://www.doaj.org/ ) to 1000 (high-end estimate) open-access journals (i.e., 50,000 to 100,000 articles), so that means at most 5% of the annual refereed literature of 2.5 million. For self-archiving, Kat Hagedorn has replied that OAIster's count for their 2002-dated self-archived full-texts is already 115,000 (indexing nearly 200 OAI archives) http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/viewcolls.html But this is really only the tip of the iceberg: OAIster does not include all OAI archives, and even all OAI archives would not include the much vaster quantity of research full-texts that are self-archived on authors' ordinary websites rather than in OAI archives. (Citeseer http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs alone harvests at least 50,000 per year in computer science alone.) (On the other hand, for our purposes, the OAIster figure does include some double-counts because it also harvests some of the open-access journals, and Kat Hagedorn replied that she still has no way of getting separate counts for journal archives vs institutional archives.) I am still drawing together the data received in response to my query, so as to estimate the absolute and relative growth rate for the two complementary sources of open-access articles (open-access publishing and open-access self-archiving). The two are, even on the most conservative estimates, about neck-and-neck at 5% each, but the crucial difference is that open access through open-access publishing is also at ceiling at 5% -- its counts can only be increased if more of the 23,000 non-OA journals convert to OA or more new OA journals are founded and capture the 23,000 non-OA journals' authorships, giving authors more open-access journals to publish in. The rates at which that is taking place can be extrapolated too, but they are bound to be slow, because journals are not easy to found, fill or convert. In contrast, open-access through self-archiving is nowhere near its ceiling -- which, even on the most conservative estimate is at least at 55% currently (and actually much higher) http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/Romeo%20Publisher%20Policies.htm My guess is that it will be much easier and faster to convince the research community and its institutions to self-archive than to found, convert or fill new OA journals. That is why I am trying to correct the disproportionate hopes that are currently being placed on the 5% solution (open-access publishing) while missing the potential of the complementary 55%-95% solution (open-access self-archiving). > Is it an important question we have to ask ourselves anyway? I think > it is good to have a yardstick on which we can measure the progress of > adopting the open access model. It is indeed an important question and yardstick. Now let us compile and examine the comparative time-series data and projections that result! Stevan Harnad -------------------------------------------------------------------- List-Post: goal@eprints.org List-Post: goal@eprints.org Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2003 12:15:01 -0400 From: "Diven, Yvette" <yvette.diven AT bowker.com> To: Stevan Harnad <harnad AT ecs.soton.ac.uk> Dear Professor Harnad, My apologies for the delay in getting this information to you. Following are active-status refereed serial counts from ulrichsweb.com as of Thursday, August 28. (The ulrichsweb.com data is updated weekly with all of the past week's new and changed records.) The numbers for refereed serials include refereed conference proceedings as well as refereed journals. The subject headings listed below are the top-level Ulrich's headings, and the counts for each include the counts for all of the sub-classifications within those headings. So, for example, "Biology" includes "Biology (General)", "Biology - Biochemistry", "Biology - Bioengineering", "Biology - Microbiology", etc. I hope that this information is useful to you in your Open Access Journals research. As Director of Product Development for Serials at Bowker, I would be thrilled if you could mention in your posted results and analysis that the numbers are from Ulrich's. We are focused on making Ulrich's a stronger database to aid serials research, and knowing that Ulrich's is helping to contribute to a better understanding of the changing serials environment is gratifying. We welcome your comments and suggestions as to the types of additional serials data that you as a researcher would like to see in Ulrich's. Please feel free to contact me at any time. Kind Regards, - Yvette COUNTS OF ACTIVE-STATUS REFEREED SERIALS FROM ULRICH'S TOTAL ALL (900+) ULRICH'S SUBJECTS: 24,116 BIOLOGY -- 2,373 CHEMISTRY -- 708 COMPUTERS -- 636 EARTH SCIENCES -- 713 GERONTOLOGY AND GERIATRICS -- 113 LINGUISTICS -- 640 MATHEMATICS -- 776 MEDICAL SCIENCES -- 4,313 PHARMACY AND PHARMACOLOGY -- 438 PHYSICS -- 660 Yvette Diven Director, Product Management, Serials R.R. Bowker LLC 630 Central Avenue New Providence, NJ 07974 Local Office Phone: 415.861.3080 Email: Web: www.ulrichsweb.com