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David Goodman
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« Reply #3 on: December 12, 2006, 04:14:07 PM » |
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As for checking open access:
Romeo lists the self-archiving policy of publishers, whether they permit eprints and under what conditions. This is useful information, especially to authors, but does not necessarily mean there is even one such article--and the journal and article title pages never tell; of the indexes, only PubMed indicates this.The optimal routine for determining this for a specific article changes from time to time, but usually starts with a search on Google Scholar, followed up if necessary by its transfer into a Google search; there are alternatives, such as starting with OAIster <http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/>, or Scirus <http://www.scirus.com> . How well Windows Live Search Academic <http://academic.live.com/> will work is not yet clear [at the moment, it isn't working at all).
The reliable place to find true open access journals, where all the articles are open access, is DOAJ <http://www.doaj.org/>. but this does not include journals that offer delayed Open access after an embargo (very common in biomedicine, and HighWire <http://highwire.stanford.edu/> is a good place to find many of them), or hybrid OA, access to only articles paid for by their authors, which is getting to be significant and now for example, includes one-fourth of the articles in PNAS. I do not know of a complete listing.
I do however follow this very closely, for it is my specialty in the Real World. In WP, I try to keep a copy of my current best advice on the Google Scholar page, but this sort of instruction doesn't really fit into WP, but we should be able to find a place for it here.
Keeping up with individual changes is not easy, and the people who keep track best are interlibrary loan specialists at major libraries, and they do it mentally.
I can certainly maintain a checklist on which ones should be checked where(we can do lists of these once we decide how to do such lists), and I see most of the online lists and commercial newsletters that announce major changes, at least in the science.
What I plan to start with is the existing pages, but then we can see. Some of this is field dependent--all actually existent journals of high energy physics are pretty good, but for cell biology that would be laughable. Circulation is a rather good measure, for 99% of them are only purchased by libraries; low circulation means that only a few top-ranking libraries have them. The only problem with circulation is that academic publishers mostly keep this a secret, because the numbers tend to be in the low hundreds, even for good journals. There are ways of getting at this indirectly, but not as a practical matter. Downloads is another good measure, and that is really a secret.
As for actually working on them, I will go by publisher, because that's the easiest way.
I'm thinking of using an infobox, but if the box had much content, there wouldn't be anything else on the page.
Previous titles is another matter. There is one commercial database (Ulrich's) which includes this, with fair accuracy, but there are some library catalogs that can be trusted, though they go one change at a time. This is something to be added gradually, the really big ones first. If we end up with a good record of these, we will be better than any non-commercial source.
For that matter, for the open access information we'd be better than any source at all.
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