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Re: Open Access Speeds Use by Others
On Tue, 16 May 2006, Chuck Hamacker wrote:
> Chronicle of Higher Education
> http://chronicle.com/news/article/438/open-access-speeds-use-by-others-of-scientific-papers-study-finds
>
> http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=3Dget-document&doi=3D10=.1371/journal.pbio.0040157
I've sent the following letter to CHE:
The Eysenbach study is certainly not "the first to compare open-access
and non-open-access papers from the same journal." See the growing
bibliography of studies on the open-access citation advantage:
http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html
Other studies listed there will also give CHE readers a better idea
of whether it is indeed "[n]ot yet clear... whether the open-access
advantage increases citation in the long run or whether the trend
is similar for other journals."
and the following letter has been published in PLoS:
http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=read-response&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0040176
PLOS, PIPE-DREAMS AND PECCADILLOS
Stevan Harnad
I applaud and welcome the results of the Eysenbach (2006)
<http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0040157> study on 1492
articles published during one 6-month period in one journal
(PNAS), showing that the Open Access (OA) articles were more
cited than the non-OA ones. I also agree fully that the findings
are unlikely to have been an artifact of PLoS's "strong and
vested interest in publishing results that so obviously endorse
our existence," nor of the fact that "the author of the article
is also an editor of an open-access journal" (all quotes are from
the PloS editorial by MacCallum & Parthasarthy, 2006).
<http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0040176>
However, I am less sure that PloS's and the author's vested
interests are not behind statements (in both the accompanying
editorial and the article itself) along the lines that: "solid
evidence to support or refute" that papers freely available in a
journal will be more often read and cited than those behind a
subscription barrier... has been surprisingly hard to find." The
online bibliography 'The effect of open access and downloads
('hits') on citation impact'
<http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html> records a
growing number of studies reporting precisely such evidence as of
2001, including studies based on data from much larger samples of
journals, disciplines and years than the PloS study on PNAS, and
they all find exactly the same effect: freely available articles
are read and cited more.
There can be disagreement about what evidence one counts as
"solid," but there can be little dispute that prior evidence
derived from substantially larger and broader-based samples
showing substantially the same outcome can hardly be described as
"surprisingly hard to find."
In fact, the only new knowledge from this small, journal-specific
sample was (1) the welcome finding of how early the OA advantage
can manifest itself, plus (2) some less clear findings about
differences between first- and last-author OA practices, plus (3)
a controversial finding that will most definitely need to be
replicated on far larger samples in order to be credible: "The
analysis revealed that self-archived articles are also cited less
often than OA articles from the same journal."
The latter (3) is a within-journal (one journal, PNAS) finding;
the overwhelming majority of self-archived articles today (on
which the prior large-sample OA citation advantage findings are
based) do not appear in journals with a paid-OA option. Hence on
the present evidence I have great difficulty in seeing this
secondary advantage as any more than a paid-OA publisher's
pipe-dream at this point.
The following, however, is not a pipe-dream, but a peccadillo:
"no other study has compared OA and non-OA articles from the same
journal." To be fair, this observation is hedged with "[a]s far
as we are aware" (but the OA-advantage bibliography is surely
public knowledge -- or should be among advocates of public access
to science) and the observation is further qualified with: "and
[also] controlled for so many potentially confounding factors."
But it has to be stated that of these "potentially confounding"
variables -- "number of days since publication, number of
authors, article type, country of the corresponding author,
funding type, subject area, submission track (PNAS has three
different ways that authors can submit a paper)... previous
citation record of the first and last authors... [and] whether
authors choosing the OA option in PNAS chose to do so for only
their most important research (they didn't)" -- many are peculiar
to this particular short-interval, 3-option, single-journal PloS
study. And several of them (country, subject, year) had already
been analyzed in papers that had been published before this 2006
article and were not taken into account despite the fact that
both their preprints and their postprints had been freely
accessible since well before publication, and that at least one
of them (Brody et al. 2005) had been explicitly drawn to the
author's attention based on a preprint draft well before the
article was submitted to PloS.
Brody et al. (2005) had found that, alongside the OA citation
advantage, more downloads in the first six months after
publication are correlated with more citations 18 months later in
physics; and Hajjem et al. (2005) had found higher citations for
OA articles within the same journal/year for 1,307,038 articles
published across 12 years (1992-2003) in 10 disciplines (Biology,
Psychology, Sociology, Health, Political Science, Economics,
Education, Law, Business, Management).
REFERENCES
Brody, T., Harnad, S. and Carr, L. (2005) Earlier Web Usage Statistics
as Predictors of Later Citation Impact. Journal of the American
Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) 56.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10713
Eysenbach, G, (2006) Citation Advantage of Open Access Articles. PLoS
Biology 4(5)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0040157
Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Gingras, Y. (2005) Ten-Year
Cross-Disciplinary Comparison of the Growth of Open Access and How it
Increases Research Citation Impact. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 28(4)
pp. 39-47. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11688/
MacCallum, C.J., and Parthasarathy, H. (2006) Open Access Increases
Citation Rate. PLoS Biology 4(5)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0040176