On Wed, 9 Mar 2005, Michel Petitjean wrote: > Many authors do not care to be read. and often even do not care > to read what write their colleagues. > All they want to do is: > <<publish or perish: add +1 in the paper count in the CV>>
It would be interesting to affix actual quantitative figures to these guesstimates! My own anecdotal experience is that (1) "Many" institutional performance evaluation committees have graduated from naive bean-counting (counting publications), to slightly less naive bean-counting, weighting the beans with the "impact factor" (average citation count) of the journal in which the publications appeared. Slightly less naive again is to consider also the direct citation count for each of the candidate's beans. Under these material circumstances, insouciance about the impact weight of one's beans would seem rather impractical. (About authors who don't read anyone else's work: nolo contendere.) (2) "Many" authors I know (myself not excepted), when they open a text in their own research area, immediately do a "vanity check" -- to see whether they themselves have been cited. This too suggests something less than utter insouciance about being read. (3) In the online age, vanity-checks have also extended to a marked interest in the download counts for one's publications. (4) Last, and perhaps least, surely there are *some* researchers who still care about whether or not their research is making an *impact*, in the sense that it is being used and built upon by others. Otherwise they might just as well have put it in a desk-drawer (having duly registered it as yet another bean, sprouted), rather than bothering with PUBLICation at all... > So they prefer journals without page charge rather than OA journals. This is a (regrettably rather common) non-sequitur: One can maximize one's research impact by maximizing access to one's papers in *two* ways. The 5% ("golden") way is to try to find a suitable OA journal to publish one's paper in (5% of journals are gold: http://www.doaj.org/ ) and the funds to pay the charges. The 95% way is to publish one's paper in the most suitable journal, regardless of whether or not it is gold, but also to make it OA by self-archiving it in one's own institutional repository. (92% of journals are already "green" in that they have given their official green light to author self-archiving: http://romeo.eprints.org/ ). Stevan Harnad AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM: A complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/ To join or leave the Forum or change your subscription address: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org UNIVERSITIES: If you have adopted or plan to adopt an institutional policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output, please describe your policy at: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php UNIFIED DUAL OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY: BOAI-1 ("green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal http://romeo.eprints.org/ OR BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a open-access journal if/when a suitable one exists. http://www.doaj.org/ AND in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article in your institutional repository. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://archives.eprints.org/