Re: Open Access: No Benefit for Poor Scientists

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

On 14-Jan-09, at 4:25 PM, Phil Davis wrote:

> Open Access has a moral agenda: to increase the flow of
> scientific information to researchers in developing nations.
> Yet a new study suggests that authors in developing countries are
> no more likely to write papers for Open Access journals and are
> no more likely to cite Open Access articles.
>
> full article at:
> http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2009/01/14/oa-developing-nations/

Comparing OA/non-OA in Developing Countries
[Fully hyperlinked version: http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/509-guid.html]

"[A]n investigation of the use of open access by researchers from 
developing countries... show[s] that open access journals are not 
characterised by a different composition of authors than the 
traditional toll access journals... [A]uthors from developing 
countries do not citeopen access more than authors from developed 
countries... [A]uthors from developing countries are not more 
attracted to open access than authors from developed countries. 
[underscoring added]"(Frandsen 2009, J. Doc. 65(1))  (See also 
"Open Access: No Benefit for Poor Scientists")

Open Access is not the same thing as Open Access Journals.

Articles published in conventional non-Open-Access journals can 
also be made Open Access (OA) by their authors -- by 
self-archiving them in their own Institutional Repositories.

The Frandsen study focused on OA journals, not on OA articles. It 
is problematic to compare OA and non-OA journals, because 
journals differ in quality and content, and OA journals tend to 
be newer and fewer than non-OA journals (and often not at the top 
of the quality hierarchy).

Some studies have reported that OA journals are cited more, but 
because of the problem of equating journals, these findings are 
limited. In contrast, most studies that have compared OA and 
non-OA articles within the same journal and year have found a 
significant citation advantage for OA. It is highly unlikely that 
this is only a developed-world effect; indeed it is almost 
certain that a goodly portion of OA's enhanced access, usage and 
impact comes from developing-world users.

It is unsurprising that developing world authors are hesitant 
about publishing in OA journals, as they are the least able to 
pay author/ institution publishing fees (if any). It is also 
unsurprising that there is no significant shift in citations 
toward OA journals in preference to non-OA journals (whether in 
the developing or developed world): Accessibility is a necessary 
-- not a sufficient -- condition for usage and citation: The 
other necessary condition isquality. Hence it was to be expected 
that the OA Advantage would affect the top quality research most. 
That's where the proportion of OA journals is lowest.

The Seglen effect ("skewness of science") is that the top 20% of 
articles tend to receive 80% of the citations. This is why the OA 
Advantage is more detectable by comparing OA and non-OA articles 
within the same journal, rather than by comparing OA and non-OA 
journals.

We will soon be reporting results showing that the within-journal 
OA Advantage is higher in "higher-impact" (i.e., more cited) 
journals. Although citations are not identical with quality, they 
do correlate with quality (when comparing like with like). So an 
easy way to understand the OA Advantage is as a quality advantage 
-- with OA "levelling the playing field" by allowing authors to 
select which papers to cite on the basis of their quality, 
unconstrained by their accessibility. This effect should be 
especially strong in the developing world, where 
access-deprivation is greatest. -- Stevan Harnad

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