I've been involved with open access journals as a professional activity from the start of the movement, long before I joined Wikipedia. There has been only limited success. Though there are almost ten thousand open access journals, 95% of them are either very small or very unimportant, and in almost all fields of study, none or almost none of the important journals are open access:
No important journals at all in chemistry are open access, Almost none in physics Almost none in geology Almost none in ecology & evolution A few in molecular & cell biology A few only in biomedical sciences None in psychology Almost none in the social sciences or the humanities Almost none in engineering and applied science A few in medicine There are only two major open access publishers with high quality journals: BMC, some of whose many journals are high quality, and PLOS, all of whose are, but there are only a few of them. Not a single one of the major university presses are open access, except for one or two journals None of the major scientific society publishers are open access, With the sole exception of BMC, none of the commercial publishers are open access, except for one or two journals The major bright spot is the insistance of the NIH and other granting agencies, that articles for research they sponsor published since about 2008 be made open access 6 or 12 months after publication. Very few of the journals that do this have extended the open access earlier. At this point, there is no academic field of study whatsoever where an adequate article could be written using only open access material. This is of course a very limiting thing for access to information not just for us, but for the world in general, and the WMF projects should certainly cooperate as closely as possible with the forces working for open access, but the suggestion that it is possible to limit to or even prefer open acces material is incompatible with the policy on using the best available sources. On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 1:53 PM, Melissa Hagemann <mhagem...@sorosny.org> wrote: > > In general, access to academic journals is extremely expensive and > usually only possible for those affiliated with universities. However > there is an alternative. There are now over 6,000 peer-reviewed open > access journals which are freely available online (www.doaj.org) and > over 1,800 academic repositories where authors deposit copies of their > research articles (www.opendoar.org). This is the result of the open > access movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access_(publishing) > which advocates for public access to publicly funded research. > > Hopefully the research which is being made available through open access > can help to support the work of the community. > > Melissa > > > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > -- David Goodman DGG at the enWP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
