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Re: Decision making by Libraries on serials and monographs and useage (re puzzled by self-archiving thread)

Joe and Sally describe why OA may (potentially) affect some journals more than others. The marginal effect of OA on elite journals, which by definition have wide circulation, would theoretically be lower than less-recognized titles.

Then what explains the fact that Eysenbach [1] reported an OA citation advantage for PNAS -- one of the most prestigious and highly-circulated multidisciplinary journals in the sciences? It could mean one of two things:

First, there may be a cumulative advantage for those journals that are already highly read and cited. OA may not provide any more access to these articles, but it may provide additional access points or quality cues to readers. Those who believe that OA democratizes access to information would be fooling themselves; the real effect is to increase elitism.

Alternatively, it could be that in a world of complex relationships, OA researchers are conflating causes and effects and reporting spurious relationships. For instance, it just so happens that author-supported OA articles published in PNAS (in Eysenbach's sample) were more than twice as likely to be featured on the front cover of the journal, were nearly twice as likely to be picked up by the media, and when cited reached, on average, nearly twice as many news outlets as subscription-based articles [3]. It would have been interesting to test whether these variables explain the OA advantage reported in PNAS, but the author declined my request for access to his dataset for empirical verification.

In order to do publish one's results in a prestigious peer-reviewed journal indexed by ISI's Web of Science, one is likely to be located at an institution with both access to resources for doing research as well as adequate access to the literature. Considering that PNAS has one of the highest circulation rates of any scientific journals, that it provides free and immediate access to readers in developing countries, that it employs a tiered pricing model that allows small institutions to pay a fraction of the cost as large institutions, and that sharing electronic copies of articles is easier than ever, it is difficult to believe that immediate access in a journal that provides free access to all of its articles after six months would result in a citation advantage.

Our multi-journal, multi-discipline randomized controlled study of OA publishing should allow us to tease out the complex factors that lead one to read and cite articles. Until then, "Science must not suffer itself to become the handmaiden of theology or economy of state." [4]

Phil Davis


Notes:

1. Eysenbach, G. (2006). Citation Advantage of Open Access Articles. PLoS
Biology, 4(5). http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0040157

2. Davis, Philip. Citation advantage of Open Access articles likely
explained by quality differential and media effects. PLoS Biology
(Response to Eysenbach).
http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=read-response&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0040157

3. Merton, R.K. Science and the Social Order. Chp 12 in The Sociology of
Science. Normal W. Storer (Ed.) University of Chicago Press. p.260.


At 07:48 PM 2/1/2007, you wrote:
Sally is being swift, not slow.  What she means, I believe, is that OA
adds access only marginally.  So for an elite publication, 99% of the
potential readers get access through subscriptions; OA would add the other
1%.  For a good but not elite publication, 75% of potential readers get
access through subscriptions; OA adds the other 25%.  For a mediocre
publication, 50% get access through subscriptions, etc., etc.

As the quality of the publication goes down, the amount of access through
OA increases; and this rather startling conclusion is based on the
crackpot notion that librarians are very, very good at what they do and
acquire the publications of greatest merit for their
constituency.  (Taking this to its logical extension, a truly useless
journal would be 100% OA.)  One could argue forever about the percentages
(and no doubt we will), but the fundamental point remains:  OA is
marginally beneficial for access, with inferior publications gaining the most.

Joe Esposito