THOMSON WHITE PAPER TOUTS GROWTH OF OPEN ACCESS JOURNALS
Thomson Scientific, part of the Thomson Corporation, has released a White Paper that suggests open access journals, while still a relatively small part of the journal landscape, are gaining impact. The paper, entitled OPEN ACCESS JOURNALS IN THE ISI CITATION DATABASES: ANALYSIS OF IMPACT FACTORS AND CITATION PATTERNS indicates that journals published under the Open Accessmodel, despite ranking lower as a group than those published under traditional models, are showing "impressive" growth. Still, OA journals represent a small minority of the published research output–of 8,700 selected journals covered in ISI’s Web of Science, only 239 are OA journals. But while open access as a business model has become something of a cause for many, the paper notes, deciphering or defining what open access means requires some effort. "Open Access at the journal level comprises a complex picture of availability," the paper acknowledges. "The evolving environment of scholarly publishing includes additional avenues for making content openly available. Our findings suggest that over 55 percent of journals and over 65 percent of articles indexed in WEB OF SCIENCE in 2003 are produced by publishers who permit some form of self-archiving, and could be made OA by author archiving."
To read the entire paper, visit: http://www.isinet.com/forms/whitepapers
Library Journal Academic Newswire: November 2, 2004
