OPEN ACCESS FOR MONEY

      To review the basics of the Open Access model- open access means anyone has access to the full text of a publication, journal or book, on the web, with no limitations except possibly a requirement to register. Two terms commonly used to describe open access papers are gold and green. Gold journals are intended to be open access from the start. Green open access journals means the author has posted copies of their manuscripts, published elsewhere, to open access sites on the web.

      There are government supported data bases of open access materials, but there are also for profit open access journals and some publishers have enough to organize them into databases.

      One I find interesting is Hindawi Publishing Corporation  (www.hindawi.com).  They make their money in three ways.  They charge fees of up to $1500 to authors to include their articles in one of 466 different peer review journals.  An institution, such as a university or research institute, can pay an annual subscription and submit their staff’s articles without further payment.  Finally Hindawi sells hard copies of their magazines.

       An Egyptian based corporation, Hindawi has flourished despite falling library budgets worldwide because its main source of income is author fees, usually paid from grants.

      Hindawi’s most important resource is the respect of the academic community.  Authors will only pay to be published if it improves their academic standing.

      However Hindawi faces the continuous problem of maintaining standards using volunteer reviewers, who hope being members of the editorial board will increase their standing.   Each article is reviewed by five editorial board members.  If they disagree about the article’s value or accuracy they then each read the others report and have a chance to change their mind

      The success of their system can be judged by the fact that in 2011 all the articles in 90 of Hindawi’s journals were included in PubMed Central. This open-access repository of biomedical articles is funded by the National Institute of Health.  Also all of Hindawi’s journals are included in the Directory of Open Access Journals and Google Scholars.

 

 

 

Japanese DOAJ

The Japan Science and Technology Agency (www.jst.go.jp) is a government agency tasked with encouraging innovation in science and technology in Japan.

Recognizing the importance of access to electronic journals one of their projects is J-STAGE (www.jstage.jst.go.jp) a searchable data base of open access journals.  Its purpose is to support the computerizing of bulletins of academic societies, journals and then make Japanese science and technology information easily accessible to Japanese and non-Japanese. 

Open access refers to electronic journals, books, conference proceedings, etc. that can be accessed without any requirement beyond registering.  J-STAGE requires registration.   

 

As of December 16^th S-TAGE contained 1591 journals or 2,451,624 full text articles.  The advanced search allows one to search by keyword, article title, full text, journal or subject area.  One can select if one wants the articles in Japanese or English, conference proceedings or journals and most important select only the peer reviewed journals.  Most college assignments require peer reviewed articles.  

Earlier reviews suggest S-TAGE was mostly medical journals but I found a high percentage of electronic and materials science journals.  I ran three tests. 

Searching “brain tumor” as full text, peer reviewed journals only, I found 28 articles in three journals. 

Searching “nano-technology” got eight articles from two journals. 

Searching “rice” limited to the humanities and social sciences area got 31 articles but all in one journal.   

GOOGLE AND MICROSOFT ARE BEHIND ON ACADEMIC JOURNALS

                 Since both are trying updates it’s worth a moment to look at Microsoft Academic Search and Google Scholar. 

                 Microsoft Academic Search (http://academic.research.microsoft.com/) is beta testing a new search page.  It makes it simple to check how many times an article has been cited, chart how co-authors have collaborated, and  find which academic institutes have produced the most cited publications. You can search for articles and books by domain, keyword, authors, journals, as well as and the conferences and organizations involved in producing them.

                Google Scholar (http://academic.research.microsoft.com/) is getting harder to find, you have to click on more and then even more to even find it.  Then Advanced Search can only be accessed if you find an unlabeled down button. Google has recently added the ability to search scholar metrics.  You can browse publications in broad categories or narrower subcategories find the most cited journals and search them by key word.

                These new features are not likely to be much use to the average student researcher just the long term professional.  Worse there is no way to limit your search for the articles that are free and available in full text.   

                Still they are free.          

News Items

The Directory of Open Access Books (www.doabooks.org/doab) was selected as the best new product of the year by the readers of the e-zine The Charleston Advisor (www.charleston.com) DOAB has reached 1255 Academic peer-reviewed books from 35 publishers.  For more info check

our November 25, 2012 entry.

The 1940 census is now available on web (http://1940census.archives.gov/)

 

SEEKING KNOWLEDGE WORLD WIDE

  

SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) is a database of articles, 377,772 articles, from 985 journals published in 16 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (plus Spain and South Africa).  One can search either all the articles by word, or limit the search by nation, region, or subject.  Most of the journals are in the biological, medical and social sciences.   Its biggest limitation is that many but not the majority of  its articles are only available in Spanish and Portuguese.

The initial reason for the creation of SciELO in 1987 was the conviction that the developing world’s scientific research was not being published in the top journals.   Lists of citations, the scientific world’s equivalent of home run stats, showed only a tiny number of articles by researchers outside the U.S., Canada and Europe were being used to support research.  

In an influential article from 1995 “Lost Science in the Third World” Luis Benitez-Bribiesca, editor of a Mexican medical journal was quoted on the subject using cholera research as an example.

“Right now cases are increasing in Mexico.  Our researchers have interesting findings about some new strains.  International journals refuse our papers because they don’t consider cholera a hot topic.  But what if these strains spread across the border to Texas and California? Previous knowledge about the disease will have been lost.  Scientists searching the literature will not find the papers published in Mexican journals, because they are not indexed.”

In the same article Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, pointed out “it is vital the developing nations communicate their research to one another.  And it is hugely unethical not to have a way for [Third World] researchers to share ideas with the medical infrastructure.”

When SciELO started in 1997 with Brazilian funding it had two major goals. 

First was to find the best way to move academic journals on line in an open access format.  Simply put open access means access to the full text of a publication, on the web, with no limitations, except possibly a requirement to register.  

Its second priority was to set up a system for keeping track of the citations of the articles.

The program started with 10 journals and grew to this year’s 985.  There has also been a considerable growth in the number of citations of Latin American authors, mostly from those listed in SciELO.

In 2009 A.L Pacer in the Canadian Journal of Higher Education declared “the most critical feature of a SciELO collection is its attention to the continuing quality of the journal it indexes and publishes.  Latin American and Caribbean journals have markedly progressed in quality and professionalism. “

This year Brazil started a book portal for the purpose of publishing “national and thematic collections of academic books online with object of maximizing the visibility, accessibility, use and impact of the research results, essays and studies that are published in them."  How long it will take other members to follow remains to  be seen.

Some commentators hope the introduction of South Africa to SciELO  will be the beginning  of  African and Asian participation.