Re: BioMed Central's open letter to the UK Science Minister, responding to inaccurate comments about open access.

["Anthony Watkinson" <anthony.watkinson@btopenworld.com>]

I have not been able to check out the statistics given in this open
letter, but I am amazed that BMC should state without qualification that
29% of senior authors responding to the latest CIBER survey actually had
published in an OA journal. The actual text is on page 30 of the report of
the survey at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ciber/ciber_2005_survey_final.pdf. In
this report there is a qualification. It seems very likely indeed that a
significant proportion of these authors thought they were publishing in an
OA journal just because for them the journal was free at the point of use.

Is this special pleading by me? I do not think so because I would suggest
that a simple calculation would show that not enough OA papers were
published out of the number of total papers published to make 29%
possible. I am sure that someone with a grasp of the appropriate
methodology could actually calculate why it is impossible.

Anthony Watkinson

----- Original Message -----
From: "Grace Baynes" <Grace@biomedcentral.com>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Saturday, October 29, 2005 12:06 AM
Subject: BioMed Central's open letter to the UK Science Minister, responding
to inaccurate comments about open access.

> Lord Sainsbury of Turville
> Science Minister
> House of Lords
> London
> SW1A 0PW
>
> Dear Lord Sainsbury,
>
> Last week, when giving testimony1 to the House of Commons Science &
> Technology Committee, you were asked for your opinion of the proposed
> position statement on open access from Research Councils UK2, a document
> that expresses strong support for a move towards open access.
>
> In your response, you repeated your call for "a level playing field"
> between open access and subscriber-only publishing models, a sentiment
> with which BioMed Central very much agrees. But you then went on suggest
> that open access was in decline, saying: "I think we have seen a peak in
> the enthusiasm for open access publishing and a fall-off in people putting
> forward proposals for it because some of the difficulties and costs are
> now becoming clear."
>
> This suggestion of a decline in interest in open access publishing is not
> at all supported by the available evidence, and simply does not reflect
> what is happening in scientific publishing. BioMed Central Limited is the
> world's leading open access publisher. In the third quarter of 2005,
> BioMed Central's manuscript submissions were up 56% compared to the
> previous year, a growth rate far exceeding that of the science publishing
> industry as a whole. Public Library of Science, a leading US-based open
> access publisher, has experienced similarly rapid growth. Every month, new
> groups of scientists and societies approach BioMed Central to start open
> access journals, or to convert their existing journals to an open access
> model.
>
> Several of the more enlightened traditional publishers have introduced
> their own open access experiments. Blackwell Publishing introduced Online
> Open, an open access experiment for 30 journals, in February 2005. Oxford
> University Press, which has already converted some journals to open
> access, launched Oxford Open in May this year. Springer, the world's
> second largest STM publisher, has offered an open access option (Springer
> Open Choice) for its 1,450 journals since May 2004, and just two months
> ago hired Jan Velterop as its Director of Open Access.3
>
> The latest survey on the attitude of senior researchers to open access,
> carried out by an independent research group at City University and
> published in September 2005, reported that compared to a previous survey
> by the same group in March 2004:
>
> The research community is now much more aware of the open access issue.
> There has been a large rise in authors knowing quite a lot about open
> access (up 10 percentage points from the 2004 figure) and a big fall in
> authors knowing nothing at all about open access (down 25 points).
> Secondly, the proportion of authors publishing in an open access journal
> has grown considerably from 11 per cent (2004) to 29 per cent. 4

[SNIP]

> Notes and references
>
> 1.  Minutes of evidence taken before Science and Technology Committee
> Wednesday 19 October, 2005.  Available from:
> http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmsctech/uc490-i/
uc49002.htm
>
> 2.  Proposed RCUK Position Statement on Access to Research Outputs.
> Available from: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/
>
> 3.  Jan Velterop to help expand Open Choice. Available from:
> http://www.springer.com/sgw/cda/frontpage/0,,5-40575-2-157192-0,00.html
>
> 4.  New journal publishing models: an international survey of senior
> researchers Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of
> Research (CIBER), 2005. Available from:
> http://www.slais.ucl.ac.uk/papers/dni-20050925.pdf

[SNIP]