Re: A COUNTER concern.

[Thomas Krichel <krichel@openlib.org>]

  Jan Velterop writes

> You are perfectly right Thomas. And we do work with the few known
> mirror archives that have all of the articles we publish. But an
> important and perhaps so far under-illuminated aspect of open access
> is that any server, anywhere, is free to take the articles and
> distribute them further, the whole corpus or just a single article,
> and anything in between, without having to tell the publisher.

yes, but is there a lot of that going on? I am not sure there is, after
all, if a paper is o/a available on a site, and I trust the site, why
would I put it on my own web server, given all the copyright implications
that this may imply.

on the contrary, there probably is quite a bit of copying of closed access
articles around, as users try to circumvent toll gates by file-sharing and
photocopying. I imagine that COUNTER does not account for this, either. So
on "copied copies" account it is not clear that server hits systematically
underrepresent o/a with respect to closed access publications.

Cheers,

Thomas Krichel                      mailto:krichel@openlib.org
                                 http://openlib.org/home/krichel
                             RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel