Thank you Arif. I have read the article this afternoon (3 January) and will download and look through your thesis asap.
 However I feel compelled to re-emphasize to the list that I am not looking for an estimate of how many articles are published annually, or ever. The first of those pieces of data is useful for estimating what I really want to know: how many active researchers are employed in year y? Particularly 2011. Of course, it will be useful to have article counts by discipline, however rough, because publication practices differ widely between disciplines. A publication in some disciplines is worth far less than in others, the number of authors/article differs widely, and journal prestige varies at least as much.  There are many other confusing factors in estimates based on article production rates which I touched on in my reply to Stevan Harnad, not least of which is the frequency of publication of equally highly respected researchers. Some publish rarely (say once every three years), others produce multiple articles per year. There are distributions in all these things which we should understand. If I mention just one, the huge disparity between articles/title in ISI and non-ISI journals listed in your article (111 vs 26, from Bjork et al) must give anyone cause to reflect! Thatâs over 4:1, too big to gloss over.  I know of course that I cannot determine exactly the number of researchers in the world, any more than anyone else can determine exactly how many articles were written or published. As an engineer in a previous career, absolute precision in these matters is not required, rather sufficient confidence that we are in the right ballpark. Anyway, thank you very much for your help and links, which I greatly appreciate.  Arthur Sale University of Tasmania   From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Arif Jinha Sent: Tuesday, 3 January 2012 5:26 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: How many researchers are there?  Arthur,  You're not going to be able to determine the exact number of researchers in the world and you will have to make good estimates. But there are direct relationships between the number of researchers, the number of articles published annually and the number of active peer-reviewed journals. Good sources for methodology are my thesis -http://arif.jinhabrothers.com/sites/arif.jinhabrothers.com/files/aj.pdf (defend ed and submitted this fall) - Article 50 million -http://www.mendeley.com/research/article-50-million-estimate-number-scholarly-a rticles-existence-6/ Methods and data are based chiefly on: Bjork et al's studies on OA share growth 2006 to current Mabe and Amin, Tenopir and King - works 1990s to early 2000s Derek De Sallo Price - 1960s - the 'father of scientometrics. - you can get the number of article from Bjork's methods and data and mine. - you can get the number of researchers from UN data but there is ratio of researchers to publishing researchers, and publishing researchers publish an average of 1 article per year, so if you can determine good estimate for that ratio you are on your way. You have good data on growth rates of researchers, articles and journals, but growth rates have increased dramatically since 2000 as demonstrated in my thesis. It got a bit complex and I tried to sort it best I could in my thesis.  all the best,  Arif    ----- Original Message ----- From: Arthur Sale To: 'Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)' Sent: Saturday, December 31, 2011 6:25 PM Subject: [GOAL] How many researchers are there?  I am trying to get a rough estimate of the number of active researchers in the world. Unfortunately all the estimates seem to be as rough as the famous Drake equation for calculating the number of technological civilizations in the universe: in other words all the factors are extremely fuzzy. I seek your help. My interest is that this is the number of people who need to adopt OA for us to have 100% OA. (Actually, we will approach that sooner, as the average publication has more than one author and we need only one to make it OA.  To share some thinking, let me take Australia. In 2011 it had 35 universities and 29,226 academic staff with a PhD. Let me assume that this is the number of research active staff. The average per institution is 835, and this spans big universities down to small ones. Australia produces according to the OECD 2.5% of the worldâs research, so letâs estimate the number of active researchers in the world (taking Australia as âtypicalâ of researchers) as 29226 / 0.025 = 1,169,040 researchers in universities. Note that I have not counted non-university research organizations (theyâll make a small difference) nor PhD students (there is usually a supervisor listed in the author list of any publication they produce).  Letâs take another tack. I have read the number of 10,000 research universities in the world bandied about. Letâs regard âresearch universityâ as equal to âPhD-granting universityâ. If each of them have 1,000 research active staff on average, then that implies 10000 x 1000 = 10,000,000 researchers.  That narrows the estimate, rough as it is, to         1.1M < no of researchers < 10M I can live with this, as it is only one power of ten (order of magnitude) between the two bounds. The upper limit is around 0.2% of the worldâs population.  Another tactic is to try to estimate the number of people whose name appeared in an author list in the last decade. Disambiguation of names rears its ugly head. This will also include many non-researchers in big labs, some of them will be dead, and there will be new researchers who have just not yet published, but I am looking for ball-park figures, not pinpoint accuracy. I havenât done this work yet.  Can we do better than these estimates, in the face of different national styles? It is even difficult to get one number for PhD granting universities in the US, and as for India and China @$#!  Arthur Sale University of Tasmania, Australia [ Part 2: "Attached Text" ] _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
