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Re: Press release: Dramatic rise in number of authors publishing in open access journals



The relative increase of nearly 1/3 is, I agree, interesting. But the
absolute percentage of all authors should certainly be taken with a hefty
dose of salt

Sally Morris, Chief Executive
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
Email: sally.morris@alpsp.org

----- Original Message ----- From: "Matthew Cockerill" <matt@biomedcentral.com>
Sent: Thursday, November 03, 2005 11:11 PM
Subject: RE: Press release: Dramatic rise in number of authors publishing in open access journals

Perhaps. But it's not clear how any such misunderstanding could explain
the large jump in authors reporting publishing in open access journals in
the 2005 CIBER study, as compared to the previous year's study.

And the 2005 study seems to consistently show open access gaining
acceptance, as compared to the 2004 study, no?

Which, indirectly, reminds me of an interesting slide I saw yesterday in a
presentation by Johannes Fournier, discussing the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinshaft's most recent study of authors and open access.
(apologies for any vagueness below, but the slides are not yet online and
the presentation was in German).

The point he made was that although it still seemed to be a fairly small
segment of scientists who were particularly enthusiastic about open
access, this correlated very strongly with the respondents reported
frequency of internet use. If you looked at the subset of data for those
who were the heaviest internet users, a distinctly larger fraction were
enthusiastic and positive about open access.

Which does, perhaps, provide another hint of the direction the wind is
blowing.

Matthew Cockerill, Ph.D.
Publisher
BioMed Central ( http://www.biomedcentral.com/ )
Email: matt@biomedcentral.com