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A 15:04 11/12/03 -0800, Michael Eisen a écrit :
I would also like to object, once again, to Stevan's continued use of this
5% open access / 95% self-archiving number. It's grossly unfair to contrast
reality (<5% of articles currrently published in open access journals) on
one side with potential (that 95% - or more accurately something like 50% -
of articles COULD be self-archived). With BMC's diverse collection of
journals, PLoS, and the many other open-access publishers in DOAJ (including
high-end journals like PLoS Biology, J. Biol, JCI, BMJ) virtually any
biomedical research article could be published in an open-access journal today.
Thus, most authors - many, many more than the 5% you imply - who want to
make their work freely available have a choice - they can publish it in a
"green" fee-for-access journal and self-archive it, or they can publish in
an open access "gold" journal. They may have reasons to choose the former
route, and there is certainly a lot of work that needs to be done to make
open access journals more appealing, but let's stop implying that the open
access journal option wasn't available.
To enlarge the debate and I would like to discuss a concrete case:
Here are some examples of what happens in my lab, a biology lab,
working in the field of animal reproduction and animal behavior.
We have about 60 researchers in our lab. We started an Open Archive
18 months ago and some of our researchers also seem to have understood the
importance of publishing in green and gold journals. 15% of them published
in BMC this year : 3 articles in two different periodicals:
in Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology (2 articles)
in BMC Neuroscience ( 1 article)
These articles consist of 3 out of the 160 annual publications of
the lab. A study 9 years ago showed that our researechers published
in 80 different periodicals (with, of course, some preferred ones). I
think it's approximately the same in 2004. After analysing the list
of the periodicals they need, we can see that there are 4-5 levels of
specialization.
They publish in general biology or physiology periodicals, such as:
Biology of the Cell, Endocrinology, Neuroscience, Journal of Biological
Chemistry...
They need to publish in very specialized journals in physiology, such as :
Chemical Senses...
But also in some specialized fields of biology (in reproduction), such as :
Biology of Reproduction, Journal of Reproduction and Fertility ...
They also need more specialized journal in physiology of reproduction and
behaviour, that is journals like :
Journal of Andrology, Theriogenology, Applied Animal Behaviour Science...
And they need very technical periodicals such as Journal of Immunoassay etc...
I think that not far from half of their needs in journals might in principle
be covered by BMC periodicals.
But the question now is: Do you think that all researchers in my lab could
publish 80 articles every year in the 3 or 4 BMC periodicals that suit
them? Are you not afraid of this kind of consanguinity ?
Another question: How many of them could succeed in publishing in PLOS, for
which we know that the rejection rate is probably about 80% ?
Helene Bosc
Bibliothecaire
Unite Physiologie de la Reproduction
et des Comportements
UMR 6073 INRA-CNRS-Universite de Tours
37380 Nouzilly
France
http://www.tours.inra.fr/
TEL : 02 47 42 78 00
FAX : 02 47 42 77 43
e-mail: hb...@tours.inra.fr
