[GOAL] Re: How many researchers are there?

[Arif Jinha]

Arthur,
Great work.  Just trying to save you some time.  Here's what I found after
working on it for about 2 years.
- # of researchers in the world is reported by UN data in the Science Report. 
- That figure directly relates to the number of journal titles which relates
directly to the number of articles, and the growth rates of articles and
researchers are 1:1.  So, even if you're not interested in the number of annual
articles published, it's important to note as a check on data and possibly a
challenge to the evidence thus far.
- There are more researchers than annual articles - about 6 to 7.  Again, a
check on data or a challenge.
 
In the absence of any undertaking of reasonable time and expense to count
researchers better than the UN, I've relied on that data not for great 
precision
but because of the logical and empirical support for the internal consistency of
the relationships (the self-organizing system of scholarly communication). 
 
I'm very confident in the precision of some estimates and growth rates for
articles and not others, those done by Mabe (1 million annual articles in 2000,
3.4% growth of journals over 3 centuries and variability in Little Science, Big
Science and Disillusionment periods) Tenopir and King (similar data in the late
1990s) and Bjork.  The 2.5 million articles frequently cited by Harnad is way
off because they failed to take into account the difference in article averages
- they used the article average from ISI and the number of titles from Ulrich's.
There is no excuse for that.  The other estimates that are way off occur before
the tools were available to get the precision needed and those are older
estimtes.
 
In addition, Bjork's work continues to cite the 3.4% average annual growth of
active journals, whereas I have noted a spike in article and journal output
since 2000 which is important to note.  The variations in article and journal
growth are what defines Little Science (before WWII), Big Science (after WWII),
Disillusionment (1970s to 2000) periods. Since the current growth rate is
minimally 4.5%, we currently see a) a reversal of disllusionment, b) the highest
variation in history, and c) the highest annual increase in production. 
Moreover, we see a massive 10% drop in the share to the West (NA, Europe,
Australia and New Zealand), as a result of globalization.  We can also see from
the data minimally 20% of articles being OA now, and the current growth rate
(last 5 yrs) pointing towards 50% in the next 20 years. So, I have named 2 new
periods after Disillusionment - Global Science (2000 to current) and Open
Science (current to future). 
 
Here are my frustrations with this research, it is rooted in the ancient
research paradigms of the 20th century, which I myself had to wade through.  
It
lacks REFLEXIVITY, and is hopelessly academic.  Academia is hopelessly
unimaginative.
 
You cannot determine the future of OA by the trend alone, logically if the share
of OA is already significant and growing rapidly, this alters the market, and
puts pressure on publishers to react.  What will happen is that as the OA share
increases, more journals will convert to OA, and more new journals will start
OA. A quick look into Urlich's tells me that the increase in new OA journals
is much higher than the current growth rate of Gold OA articles.  Secondly,
the growth of mandates is spectacular, but the effect takes 2 years to 
manifest
so we are only going to start to see that in the next decade.  That means an
acceleration of the trends that I've pointed out is likely, begging the 
question
as to who in their right mind would publish a Toll Access journal in the year
2030, to a global audience who will see Toll Access as a dinosaur? 
 
Major publishers, as we've seen, have started OA brands and this will continue
until a major publisher converts their entire product line to OA.  That
publisher will be loved because they will have a useable website, and the others
will start to look even more awful.
 
You cannot determine the future either by the behaviour of current researchers,
since we are in the midst of a vast demographic shift from a research world
dominated by Western baby boomers who are retiring or will retire in the next 20
years.  You should determine the future of OA by the behavior of future
researchers who reflected the boom in the global youth population, and grew up
in digital culture.  Pay attention to students. 
 
The goals of OA create this change, so you have a reflexive effect particularly
when researchers are transparently advocates of OA (which is better than
attempting a facade of neutrality impossible for the researcher whose choices we
are concerned with).  The more you succeed in advocating OA, the more you
re-arrange and accelerate the data you're studying.  But no one is talking to
the students.
 
Following my research, I decided to register a new publising firm and I'm
actually much more focused at the moment on creative arts and culture - so I'm
using what I call an Open Creative Commercial business model.  I plan to 
publish
scholarly communication going forward, though I'm not satisfied by the 'article'
as a format since this was designed for print.  When we publish in print, there
will be articles but they will have to justify their production value by being
both sound scholarship and nice to read. Most journal articles are awful reads.
 
My thesis is not that nice to read because my university requires me to confine
myself to 20th century conventions.  I apologize for this since you have 
decided
to read it.  What I will do is put together a web presentation of the thesis,
when I have recovered from academia.  I'm satisfied that the data shows that 
the
research world is changing, and I can't understand why OA advocates pay not
attention to students, particularly grad students since it is their culture and
attitudes which will determine their legacy and the future of OA.  OA should 
pay
attention to and encourage students, and students know more about how to use 
the
web than their professors.
 
There are several reasons why students are Occupying campuses, and tuition is
only one problem.  Respect is the mai problem.  It is like the 'Bread and 
Roses'
strike, we want the money problem to be solved, but we want respect more than
anything.
 
There is the lack of respect for students' at universities, particularly at the
biggest ones in the North/West, which is characterized by a culture of research
entitlement.  That is to say, profs generally chase research money and neglect
their students, adminstrators direct funds to a massive, bureaucratic
institutional structure and the value and quality of education does not keep
pace with social change. Students encounter outdated lessons, teaching which
does not observe pedagogical knowledge, grading which discourages innovation,
high debt load, and the parochial tradition of bullying students with
criticism.  The criticism is largely habitual by now, since profs do not have
the time to constructively assist 100s of students in their classes. 
 
Profs know and understand that the institutions are broken, but they have zero
time to address problems.  The system of tenure puts forward the false notions
of 'academic freedom' as if it were a carrot, whereas all it is is job
security.  Thus, their days are spent chasing this carrot, and carrying the
heavy workload of dealing with 20th century administration.  They are 
time-poor 
They do this for the money.
 
Academic freedom cannot be granted, it is inherent.  I learned that in high
school when I cut class to learn about the world.  All the best critical young
thinkers are fed up with a generation that has led us to crisis, failure,
climate change, war, a university climate which does not tolerate the
spirituality or mysticism that informs arts and culture, and that used to 
infuse
intellect with brilliance.  In the Muslim world, I think we understand that the
great towering intellects of history were all mystics.  Academia and in
particular social sciences,  holds giant cultural prejudices about the 
nature of
reality, all of which were rejected by modern physics 50 years ago. 
 
University today is oppression by debt and drudgery and old white folks who
feelg guilty about global decline.  This will be the case until it is occupied
by the love of wisdom again.  Access to scholarship and Open Science 
marks the
end of exclusivity to scholarship reserved for elites who are members of rich
institutions, and ends the cultural hegemony of accreditated knowledge.
 
Tomorrow's researchers are going to take knowledge into vast new dimensions of
integrated understanding together with the need to raise children in a world
that one must admit is schizoprhenic, bipolar and personality-disordered! It is
chaotic and it can only be tolerated by a student who becomes a Master, who
grounds themselves in enlightenment - intellectual, spiritual, mystical and
devotional.  My child's studies in Sufism will be as important as their studies
in maths. There is no university today that understands any of this. 
 
Because the OA trend is irreversible and people do not require nor reasonably
should place trust in peer-review anymore, all of the topics we are now
interested in quickly fade, and we become interested in the action of sharing
knowledge and being their own filter, doing it rather than letting institutions
do it.  It would be unwise for today's university teachers to place great
emphasis on publishing in journals anyway, but it would be wise for them to
teach their students how to be leaders in contemporary thought, how to navigate
truth and reality, and to be informationally wise, and to be fearless about the
Openness paradigm - share your work! For me it's like the Blues Brothers - 'I'm
on a mission from God'. lol.
 
Now that I've finished my MA, I don't have to conform anymore and I can be
myself again - mystic-philosopher-entrepreneur-occupier.  There is a lot of
bitterness I need to transform into beauty, which is why I Occupy myself with
the Creative Arts at the moment. Poetry, literature, music, visual art,
photography, creative capitalism and mutual aid.  This was dashed off quickly,
and I really ought to be on my zafu doing anapasati (that's Buddhist for
'sitting around').  Do you think, though, that there will ever space in the
future for the Bohemian at university - the Alan Watts type? I hope so. 
Otherwise, you'll just say to people 'I got this strange letter from this
student who is probably mentally ill or on drugs'.  Ugggh. That is the Brave 
New
World we are in.
 
If this stuff is less fun and interesting to read than my thesis, I've lost you!
I wish you greatness in life, the depth of being human, and a good death.
 
'I believe that unconditional love and unarmed truth will have the final say in
reality' - MLK.
 
all the best,
 
Arif
 
yo
 
      ----- Original Message -----
From: Arthur Sale
To: 'Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)'
Sent: Monday, January 02, 2012 11:43 PM
Subject: [GOAL] Re: How many researchers are there?

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! That?s 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 world?s
research, so let?s estimate the number of active researchers in the
world (taking Australia as ?typical? of researchers) as 29226 / 0.025 =
1,169,040 researchers in universities. Note that I have not counted
non-university research organizations (they?ll make a small
difference) nor PhD students (there is usually a supervisor listed
in the author list of any publication they produce).

 

Let?s take another tack. I have read the number of 10,000 research
universities in the world bandied about. Let?s regard ?research
university? as equal to ?PhD-granting university?. 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 world?s 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 haven?t 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

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