As of today, 3.5 million articles are archived in PubMedCentral. 1,685 journals are providing all of their content to PMC. This number is growing on a regular basis (it's one of the things I track in my Dramatic Growth of OA series).
It is true that this is less than 100% full, immediate open access to all of the world's medical literature, but the growth in both numbers and percentages is ongoing. This progress is something I prefer to applaud and celebrate on a regular basis. Noticing the numbers of journals that continue to join PMC as full participation journals, reduce and eliminate embargo periods is a great way to encourage other journals to follow suit, as well as an appropriate if indirect well-deserved "thank you" to the good people at NIH and at the journals who are working hard to make this happen. best, Heather On 2015-06-01, at 10:16 AM, Michael Eisen <mbei...@gmail.com<mailto:mbei...@gmail.com>> wrote: There's a difference between trying to be inclusive, and redefining goals and definitions to the point of being meaningless. I can not tell you how many times I hear that the NIH provides open access because they make articles freely available after a year. This is not just semantics. The belief that the NIH provides open access with its public access policy provides real drag on the quest to provide actual open access. You can argue about whether or not the policy is a good thing because it's a step in the right direction, or a bad thing because it reifies delayed access. But calling what the provide "open access" serves only to confuse people, to weaken our objectives and give the still far more powerful forces who do not want open access a way to resist pressure for it. On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 5:00 AM, Heather Morrison <heather.morri...@uottawa.ca<mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>> wrote: hi David, Redefining open access and understanding that a great many people are moving towards open access in slightly different ways are two different things. My post will focus on the benefits of a more inclusive and welcoming approach to open access. For example, I have been conducting interviews and focus groups with editors of small journals that either are, or would like to be, open access. Behind the more than 10 thousand journals listed in DOAJ are probably much more than 10 thousand such editors, working hard to convince colleagues to move to open access, struggling to figure out how to do this in order to make ends meet. While some of us have been active and vocal in OA discussions and policy formulation, others have been quietly doing this work, often contributing a great deal of volunteer effort, over the years. We rarely hear from these people, but actively listening and figuring out how to provide the support needed for the journals to thrive in an OA environment is in the best interests of continuing towards a fully open access and sustainable system. These people are OA heroes from my perspective, whether their journal is currently OA or not. In my experience, when someone says their journal is free online after a year and they would like to move to OA, asking about the barriers and what is needed to move to OA results in productive discussions. OpenDOAR maintains a list of over 2,600 vetted open access archives: http://opendoar.org/ OA archives have made a very great deal of work open access - so much so that counting it all is very hard! The thesis, for example, was until recently available in perhaps 1 or 2 print copies (that libraries were reluctant to lend as they were not replaceable) and microfilm. Today we are well on our way to open and online by default for the thesis. arXiv in effect flipped high energy physics to full preprint OA close to two decades ago. PubMed was an early OA success story making the Medline index available for free. In the 1990's I remember how big a deal it was for a small Canadian university college to buy access to Medline, and even then having access restricted to senior students in biology. Today it's free for everyone with internet access. So is Medline Plus, which provides high quality free consumer health information. PubMedCentral both makes the medical literature available and ensures that it is preserved, working with both authors and journals to make this happen. By my calculations, 30% of the literature indexed in PubMed is freely available through PubMed 2 years after publication (all literature, no restrictions based on funder policy); 32% after 3 years. For the data, see the Dramatic Growth of Open Dataverse http://dataverse.scholarsportal.info/dvn/dv/dgoa download the latest spreadsheet and go to the PMC Free tab. These archives have happened because librarians and others have fought for the resources to develop the archives, often the policies (there are a great many more thesis deposit policies than are listed in ROARMAP), and educating anyone who would listen about OA. Many smart people worked on the concept and technology, and many if by no means all authors have taken the time to deposit their works. In the early years, the OA movement really was small, and it is a good thing that some of us stepped up to defend OA against attacks. Today I think we should ask ourselves whether this defensiveness has become a habit. Are we starting to snap at OA friends as much as OA detractors? Are we over-reacting? The Elsevier archiving policy change is unfortunate, a step in the wrong direction, and fully merits critique. But this is not the same level of wrongfulness as Elsevier's lobbying for the Research Works Act a few years ago, which would have prevented the US from enacting public access legislation. respectfully, Heather On 2015-06-01, at 5:09 AM, David Prosser wrote: > > Ever since ‘Open Access’ was first defined there have been people who have > wanted to redefine it. Heather is the latest of these. The trouble is, by > broadening the definition of ‘Open Access’ it is in danger of becoming > meaningless. > > So, Heather wants to include journals who make their content freely available > after one or two years. I certainly agree that free access after two years > is better than no free access after two years, but where do we draw the line > - is a five year embargo ‘Open Access'? Ten? Fifty? And Heather has warned > us of the hypothetical dangers of CC-BY papers being re-enclosed, but wants > us to consider entire archives where free access can be turned off at the > flick of a switch at the whim of the publisher as being open access! > > I’m all for celebrating free archives, and if somebody wants to compile a > list then that would be great - but let’s not call it ‘Open Access’. The > trouble with all the attempts to redefine ‘Open Access’ is that nobody has > come up with a definition that improves on that of the Budapest Open Access > Initiative of 2002. > > Heather’s final paragraph is frankly baffling. I know of nobody who feels > that 'the OA movement consists of the small group of people who have been to > meetings in Budapest’. What I do know is that many of those who attended the > first meeting in 2002 where the definition of Open Access was thrashed out > have spend a huge amount of their time over the past 13 years travelling the > world promoting open access. Often, especially in the early years, to > audiences that were in single-figures and/or overtly hostile. The fact that > there is an OA movement today is, in great part, thanks to the inspiring > efforts of those early pioneers (together with others). They have advocated > for repositories, for mandates, for open source software to allow cheaper > journal publishing, for more liberal licensing, etc., etc. Denigrating them > by implication is quite ridiculous revisionism. (And for full disclosure, I > attended the 10th anniversary meeting in Budapest, where we were able to > celebrate a vibrant, international OA movement.) > > David > > > > On 30 May 2015, at 20:03, Heather Morrison > <heather.morri...@uottawa.ca<mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>> wrote: > >> What if, instead of condemning the many people who are doing their best to >> provide the most open access they feel they can, the OA movement were to be >> more inclusive? For example, DOAJ excludes journals that make their work >> freely available after one or two years' embargo. I realize and agree that >> we want immediate OA, but the vast majority of such journals are published >> by people who are completely in favour of open access but just haven't >> figured out how to make the economics work for them. >> >> The opposite of open access is closed access. The Big Chill report on the >> silencing of federal scientists in Canada is a good illustration. Excerpt: >> "the survey [of Canadian federal scientists] ...found that nearly >> one-quarter (24%) of respondents had been directly asked to exclude or alter >> information for non-scientific reasons and that over one-third (37%) had >> been prevented in the past five years from responding to questions from the >> public and media" from: >> http://www.pipsc.ca/portal/page/portal/website/issues/science/bigchill >> >> I understand that the U.S. has had similar problems with political >> interference with science, e.g. states such as Florida having legislature >> forbidding reference to climate change (example here: >> http://fcir.org/2015/03/08/in-florida-officials-ban-term-climate-change/) >> >> Even without any political interference, works under toll access can be >> locked down for the full term of copyright. In the U.S. that's life of the >> author plus 70 years. If a work is written 30 years before an author dies, >> that's a century. The great many works freely available within a year or a >> few of publication should be understood as a huge success, not a failure. >> >> If the OA movement consists of the small group of people who have been to >> meetings in Budapest [sometimes people on this list talk as if this were the >> case], that's a small movement indeed and not likely to grow very much. On >> the other hand, if the OA movement is seen as the millions of authors who >> have provided free access to their own work (however they did this), the >> thousands of journals providing free access (whether we think they are >> perfect in this or not), the thousands of repositories - that's a huge >> global movement, one that we can build upon to continue and grow the >> momentum to date. >> >> best, >> >> -- >> Dr. Heather Morrison >> Assistant Professor >> École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies >> University of Ottawa >> http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html >> Sustaining the Knowledge Commons http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/ >> heather.morri...@uottawa.ca<mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> GOAL mailing list >> GOAL@eprints.org<mailto:GOAL@eprints.org> >> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal > > > _______________________________________________ > GOAL mailing list > GOAL@eprints.org<mailto:GOAL@eprints.org> > http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org<mailto:GOAL@eprints.org> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal -- Michael Eisen, Ph.D. Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor of Genetics, Genomics and Development Department of Molecular and Cell Biology University of California, Berkeley _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org<mailto:GOAL@eprints.org> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
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