Open Access Advantage (or Not!)

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

I am not competent to assess the discussion between Stevan 
Harnad, Phil Davis, Peter Banks, and others concerning what is 
called the Open Access Advantage, which sounds oddly to my ear 
like a frequent flier program.  I do wish to clarify two domains 
that are being confused in this discussion, unless it is I who is 
befuddled by the terms.

I take it that the discussants use "citation" in the formal sense 
in which one author cites another in a paper.  It should be 
self-evident that Open Access cannot have anything to do with 
citations, whether they are great or few in number.  OA simply 
means a user can read material through the mediation of a Web 
browser without having to pay for it or having someone else 
(e.g., a librarian) pay for it.  A citation requires a positive 
action on the part of an author.  An author can cite a paper that 
is OA or one that is "toll-access."  Indeed, presumably sometimes 
authors cite papers they have not read at all.  If all the 
world's papers were OA, and every researcher read every one of 
them in his or her field, it is theoretically possible that not 
one citation would result from it.  Authors cite articles because 
they provide value to the authors' own work.  Open Access has 
nothing to do with it and therefore, if there is an OA Advantage, 
it must lie elsewhere.

The OA Advantage, if it exists, lies not in citations but in 
findability. How can a researcher cite an article that he or she 
does not even know exists?  I happen to believe that at this time 
the likelihood of a researcher not knowing about a meritorious 
article that could be of value to his or her work is highly 
improbable, but I don't wish to argue the point here. 
Researchers find articles because they see them cited, because 
colleagues recommend them, because they use insitutional or 
product- or publisher-specific search engines, or because they 
use a "universal" (that is, publicly available) search engine 
such as Google.  Open Access only pertains to the universal 
search engines.  All other ways of finding articles have nothing 
to do with OA and thus cannot yield an OA Advantage. OA, thus, is 
a means to market articles (that is, call attention to them) to 
Google and its kin, and any OA Advantage lies in Google-like 
findability, not in increased citations.  The term of art for 
this is search-engine optimization.  But even a well-SEO'd 
article will not yield any citations if other authors don't 
choose to cite the article.  OA can bring a researcher to the 
foyer, but it is no guarantee of a dance.

Of course, an author would be crazy not to want optimal 
findability.  Last year I posted to this list an argument to the 
effect that any advantage OA had in findability (NOT in 
citations, since OA has nothing to do with citations) would 
shortly be overcome by publishers (the bigger the better, because 
the big ones have more resources), who would commit resources to 
SEO.  Size matters:  a single self-archived article would have 
little chance of climbing the Google rankings because of the way 
the Google algorithms work.  Successful publishers would find 
ways to expose limited amounts of content and metadata to search 
engines, and OA would fade away, at least in terms of any 
presumed findability advantage.  I was wrong.

In order for my thesis to have been correct, the large 
toll-access publishers would have to make investments in SEO, but 
as best as I can tell, they have not.  Most publishers continue 
to operate in such a way as to imply that the public Internet is 
something of a bad neighborhood, to be avoided.  OA, however 
feckless most of its implementations to date, walks on the wild 
side.  Traditional publishers are making a huge error by focusing 
entirely on "walled garden" approaches to driving up citations. 
Google is evolving into the de facto universal interface, and any 
publisher who does not invest heavily in marketing to the Google 
algorithms is endangering the publishing enterprise and 
short-changing authors.  Findability matters.

Contra the OA advocates, an author should not be insisting on 
self-archiving as a means to increase citations (because it 
won't) or even to increase findability, which is the necessary 
but not sufficient step to increased citations.  Rather, the 
author should be challenging publishers on different metrics. 
Who is your search-engine marketing team?  How many page views 
does your site get?  How does your Web presence compare to the 
competition's?  If you are not going to make an attempt to bring 
my work to the attention of the universal interface, why 
shouldn't I simply take up self-archiving?

Open Access is a poorly thought-out, amateurish, and risky 
strategy that will nonetheless prevail if traditional publishers 
don't begin to take the Internet seriously.  Few do.

Joe Esposito