Here’s a simple idea for showing how Open a given field of endeavour is (thanks to Peter Suber Measuring the OA Quotient of a research topic):
Matt Cockerill, How open is your research area? BMC blog, July 22, 2007. Excerpt:Using PubMed’s “Limits” tab, it is easy to filter searches by date of publication, and also by whether an article has a link to an online full text, and whether that online full text is freely available….
One handy side effect of this is that it is possible to search PubMed for articles in the last 60 days, and to calculate an Open Access Quotient to quantify just how open a particular research field is – i.e. what fraction of the research in that area is available with open access immediately following publication.
[Open Access Quotient = (PubMed results with open access fulltext links for last 60 days) / (PubMed results with fulltext links for last 60 days)]
The OAQ for PubMed as a whole currently stands at 6.8%, but this overall figure conceals major variation between fields.
[Malaria 19.8%, microarray 16.9%, genomic 12.9%, influenza 12.3%, AIDS 11.3%, cancer 7.2%, cardiovascular 5.0%, clinical trial 4.0%, PutMed average 6.8% …]
Is there a research area with a higher Open Access Quotient than malaria? Why not help us find out?
We’ll send an “I’m Open” BioMed Central T-shirt to whoever can identify the biomedical field with the highest Open Access Quotient (and we’d also be interested to know what fields seem to have the lowest).
To qualify, a PubMed Search should be based on conceptual keywords (not author or journal names) and should return at least 100 articles which have online fulltexts published in the last 60 days. Send your findings to blog@biomedcentral.com …PS Comment. For topics covered by PubMed, the OAQ is a great idea. I’ve been hoping for such a measurement for all topics since 2002, but it’s impractical (so far) for fields where there is no PubMed or equivalent. By all means, however, let’s start with PubMed and measure what is measurable
PMR: We can use this in reverse for the game of “The Most Closed Discipline on the Planet”. It’s fairly easy to use Pubmed – I have already shown (Is Natural Product Synthesis Interesting?) how we can measure the interest of a discipline by how many hits it gets in Pubmed. (The answer to the above question – (“is anyone other than chemists interested in what the chemists are trying to make”) -is generally “no”. So I expect Natural Product Synthesis to be a candidate since no-one other than chemists read it and so there is no reason for it to be Open. Just point a robot at Pubchem with the words “total synthesis” and see how many Open articles you get. My prediction is < 0.1%.
More seriously, metrics and labels are critical. We need to be able to tell at a glance what the OA status of a paper is. Linking to the full text is a second best – It won't find many of the "green" OA papers.