[IRTalk] Fwd: [GOAL] OA in the news: another reason for immediate OA

[Hilton Gibson]

This one is very personal for me.

*Hilton Gibson*
Stellenbosch University Library
*http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2992-208X
<http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2992-208X>*


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Juan Pablo Alperin <juan at alperin.ca>
Date: 21 February 2017 at 22:18
Subject: [GOAL] OA in the news: another reason for immediate OA
To: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" <goal at eprints.org>


Hello all,

Today we published a short blog <https://goo.gl/w5Y3RR> post looking at
whether or not articles linked from news stories were OA or not. We found
that of all the news stories published last year with "cancer" in the title
(identified by Altmetric.com), 60% of them were behind a paywall. That
means only 40% of the research behind the news story was publicly
available.

Of course, some of those stories were self-archived, although we only found
an additional 10% (of the total) through the new service oaDOI
<http://oadoi.org> (which does a BASE search).

We also looked at the published date of the story and compared it to the
published date of the article, and found that almost 25% of the stories
happen within a day of the article publication, 50% appear within two
weeks, and 75% of the stories are published within the first three months
of the article’s publication.

Lots of caveats with the data (working with data from across publishers is
always messy), but my key takeaway here is that a 1 year embargo (or even a
6 month embargo, for that matter) prevents public access to all the
interest in research that is generated by the news.

To borrow from PKP's recent statement
<https://pkp.sfu.ca/2017/02/20/a-public-knowledge-project-commitment-in-light-of-the-trump-presidency/>
in light of the Trump presidency, "at no time ... has it been more vital
for the public and the media to have ready access to empirical findings,
verifiable results, and scholarly inquiries in their efforts to redress the
forces of willful ignorance and prejudice."

Regards,

Juan Pablo Alperin
Assistant Professor, Canadian Institute for Studies in Publishing
Associate Director, Public Knowledge Project
Simon Fraser University


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