[GOAL] Tireless Ad Hoc Critiques of OA Study After OA Study: Will Wishful Thinking Ever Cease?
Stevan Harnad
publishing increase citation rates? Studies conducted in this area
have not yet adequately controlled for various kinds of sampling
bias." http://editorsupdate.elsevier.com/2012/03/the-effect-of-open-access-upon-citation-impact/
No study based on samples and statistical significance-testing has the
force of an unassailable mathematical proof.
But how many studies showing that OA articles are downloaded and cited
more have to be published before the ad hoc critiques (many funded and
promoted by an industry that has something of an interest in the
outcome!) and the hopeful special pleading tire of the chase?
There are a lot more studies to try to explain away here:
http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html
Most of them just keep finding the same thing...
(By the way, on another stubborn truth that keeps coming back despite
untiring efforts to say it isn't so: Not only is OA research
downloaded and cited more -- as common sense would expect, as a result
of making it accessible free for all, rather than just for those whose
institutions can afford a subscription -- but requiring (mandating) OA
self-archiving increases OA self-archiving. Where on earth did Henk
get the idea that some institutions' self-archiving "did not increase
when their OA regime was transformed from non-mandatory into
mandatory"? Or is Henk just referring to the "mandates" that state
that "you are required to self-archive only if and when your publisher
says you may self-archive, and not if they say you may only
self-archive if you are not required to"...? Incredulous? See here --
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/822-.html -- and
weep for the credulous [or chuckle for the sensible]...)
Stevan Harnad
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J.W.Sc...@lumc.nl
Is it really common sense? You write: "Not only is OA research downloaded and cited more -- as common sense would expect, as a result of making it accessible free for all, rather than just for those whose institutions can afford a subscription".
First, downloaded more - I can agree. But cited more? This might be an entire different matter. Usually, as common sense would expect, researchers will cite. The general public, however, will not cite - they do not publish research articles. Given that researchers have "more" access than the general public, due to the access policies of their institution (paid-for-access, open-access, access-by-delivery), the citations to articles will not be hampered by accessibility. Because when it comes to citing an article, a serious researcher has to read it. And to read it, means: getting access, in one way or another.
Jan W. Schoones
Walaeus Library, The Netherlands
Ross Mounce
> the citations to articles will not be hampered by accessibility.
You're kidding me right?
It's quite common to have points in a manuscript that need to be
supported by several references (X 2001; Y 2002; Z 2003). In these
instances, in my experience researchers use the most famous examples,
but also the most easily accessible examples. But the advantage is not
just limited to this case. There's an abundance of literature these
days, and thus the researcher has a choice of which articles to cite
(often it would be too excessive to cite all relevant papers). Thus
easily accessible articles have a clear advantage.
It's very hard to cite articles you can't easily access!
With the pressure to publish, no-one will wait days for an
inter-library loan. They'll just search for an alternative immediately
accessible paper to cite. It's not lazy scholarship, it's practical
efficient scholarship in my opinion. And it inadvertently or otherwise
promotes open access research, which in my opinion is no bad thing.
So I'm really not surprised open access research has citation
benefits. It makes intuitive sense to me as a current researcher.
Ross
--
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Ross Mounce
PhD Student
Fossils, Phylogeny and Macroevolution Research Group
University of Bath
4 South Building, Lab 1.07
http://about.me/rossmounce
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Stevan Harnad
The Netherlands, wrote:
> You write: "Not only is OA research downloaded and cited more -- as common sense would expect, as a result of making it accessible free for all, rather than just for those whose institutions can afford a subscription".
>
> First, downloaded more - I can agree. But cited more? This might be an entire different matter. Usually, as common sense would expect, researchers will cite. The general public, however, will not cite - they do not publish research articles. Given that researchers have "more" access than the general public, due to the access policies of their institution (paid-for-access, open-access, access-by-delivery), the citations to articles will not be hampered by accessibility. Because when it comes to citing an article, a serious researcher has to read it. And to read it, means: getting access, in one way or another.
Jan, there are two assumptions in your reply:
(1) Researchers have sufficient access "one way or another".
and
(2) The extra downloads for open access articles come from the general
public (who read, but do not cite).
There are good reasons to doubt both these assumptions:
1. Researchers do not have sufficient access. All researchers are
familiar with access denial when they click on articles to which their
institutions do not have subscription access. When that way does not
work, the "other" way -- to pay $30 per article -- is not a viable
option, particularly in an online world where a researcher might be
searching and seeking immediate click-through access to dozens of
articles a day (if only to skim them and find that many of them are
not relevant enough to read, let alone cite).
All of this adds up -- and it adds up to the significantly increased
downloads *and* citations that study after study keeps finding, in
field after field -- an outcome that publishers are going to great
pains to try to deny.
2. In health-related research, the general public has a great interest
in reading the readable, relevant articles. But this general public
interest does not extend to all or even most scholarly and scientific
disciplines (even though for some open access advocates, the
hypothesis of a public desire and need to read the peer-reviewed
literature -- written mostly for fellow-researchers to use and build
upon, in furthering research -- has become a very persuasive motto:
"public access to publicly funded research").
It would require evidence -- not assumptions -- to demonstrate
(discipline by discipline) that the increased downloads of
peer-reviewed research resulting from open access (and found in every
discipline) come mostly from non-peer rather than peer access.
Until and unless such evidence is found, the natural null hypothesis
is that the increased downloads resulting from OA, found and reported
by study after study, are the cause of the increased citations, found
and reported by study after study.
And that the increased downloads and citations for OA research are
both coming from the primary intended readership of the peer-reviewed
scholarly and scientific journal literature: the scholars and
scientists for whose uptake and usage -- in building further research
-- the peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journal literature is
conducted, written, peer-reviewed and published by researchers (and
funded by the general public) for the sake of research progress and
research applications, to the benefit of the general public.
(It is rather hard to understand how the research library community
could believe fervently in the journal affordability crisis while at
the same time believing that their users can nevertheless get access
to all they need "one way or another"...)
keith....@stfc.ac.uk
Of course I agree with the points already made about downloads and citation based on open easy availability.
I wanted to pick up on Stevan's point about
very persuasive motto:
"public access to publicly funded research"
This is not restricted to health research but also environment, some areas of astronomy and wider. More importantly, though, most of the general public (as opposed to researchers) gain the information via the media (or some researchers who happen to be great communicators) and it is important that such 'science journalists' should have free open easy access to the relevant information in order to interpret / digest and present for the public a balanced picture of research in a particular area.
Best
Keith
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-----Original Message-----
From: goal-b...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-b...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
Sent: 23 March 2012 09:14
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
and
Stevan Harnad
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Scanned by iCritical.
J.W.Sc...@lumc.nl
Thanks for your input - some of which I would like to comment on.
Dear Ross,
> Thus easily accessible articles have a clear advantage.
Of course, easily accessible articles have a clear advantage. Open Access articles are a sub-set of easily accessible articles, and so are other subsets of articles as well - in the given institutional research area. So in my view the OA articles have an advantage, but it is less clear than one might suppose.
> It's very hard to cite articles you can't easily access!
Not very hard - just a matter of priority and a bit of effort. Citing is part of scientific research: content (relevancy) is more important than form (time; available right now).
> no-one will wait days for an inter-library loan.
Then I know quite some no-ones - and also, inter library loans do not take days these days.
Dear Andrew,
> You are putting the cart before the horse here. A decision to cite
> depends (when the researcher is doing their job properly) on being
> able to read. Only after an article has been read can the decision
> to cite or not come into it.
Of course, quite right: you can only cite an article if you have read it. In my experience, the access to non-AO-articles is sufficient to suggest what I'm suggesting: there could be a citation advantage for OA articles, but it might be lower than one might presume, if it exists at all.
> If I don't have access to the article, it doesn't even get added to my citaton database
If it might be a truly relevant article, you are doing yourself not a favor. Of course it depends what goals you have, but if an article might influence your conclusions, one should do more to read it then stop when some site says no go.
Dear Stevan,
> 1. Researchers do not have sufficient access.
In my view there is quite some access. The sufficiency of access might differ per person and institution. What we probably both can agree on is the following statement: researchers do not have access to everything.
> It is rather hard to understand how the research library community could
> believe fervently in the journal affordability crisis while at the same time believing
> that their users can nevertheless get access to all they need "one way or another"...)
I am indeed part of the research library community. However, I am not a believer. I'm also not a very fervent person. I am merely observing.
Cordially,
Jan W. Schoones
Walaeus Library, The Netherlands
-----Original Message-----
From: goal-b...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-b...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
Sent: vrijdag 23 maart 2012 10:14
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Andrew A. Adams
> > You are putting the cart before the horse here. A decision to cite
> > depends (when the researcher is doing their job properly) on being
> > able to read. Only after an article has been read can the decision
> > to cite or not come into it.
> Of course, quite right: you can only cite an article if you have read it. In my experience, the access to non-AO-articles is sufficient to suggest what I'm suggesting: there could be a citation advantage for OA articles, but it might be lower than one might presume, if it exists at all.
>
> > If I don't have access to the article, it doesn't even get added to my citaton database
>
> If it might be a truly relevant article, you are doing yourself not a favor. Of course it depends what goals you have, but if an article might influence your conclusions, one should do more to read it then stop when some site says no go.
It might be relevant, but in the part of my post that you excised I pointed
out that there are more articles published within my (very broad, very
interdisciplinary) area than I could possibly read, even if I spent all my
time reading and not writing or teaching or thinking. What else am I supposed
to do with the hundreds (yes, really!) of articles that I locate through back
and forward reference searches, special issues on relevant topics, google
scholar searches and personal recommendations? That's the typical starting
point for me. I don't have the research funds or the inclination to give
publishers more for an individual article (to which I often am then only
granted access for one day so that if I manage to accidentally delete the PDF
I have to pay again) than I do for a whole book on many topics. There are
enough articles on enough topics that are accessible either through
subscription or OA that I ignore the ones I can't access. I'd prefer to be
able to include them in my initial browsing but financial issues intervene
(and the financial issues also waste my time because the first approach to an
article is waste when I can't then access it, but I'd be throwing good money
after bad time if I then paid for access individually and the only options I
know are: subscription access, OA, direct eprint or per article fees (this
last including ILL which takes longer and still costs).
My time and my money are both in limited supply and so I access what I can
without spending more of either than is reasonable. Values of reasonable vary.
Another anecdote. One of my former colleagues (from a second tier UK Uni) is
currently on sabbatical and a visiting prof at a first tier UK uni. One of
the things she is very happy about with the visiting position is the
enormously greater access to the literature that their subscription basis is
giving her. She works in a very similar manner to me but at her main
institution is hampered in her research by lack of access. Just this last
couple of weeks while visiting me she has accessed tens, perhaps as many as a
hundred, articles through the library subscription of the uni with the better
access. But she's still found articles she can't access through them or OA
and we've given up on them to focus on the ones we do have access to.
There IS an access problem and so far I am convinced that the evidence is
that the only way to solve the access problem is universal OA mandates into
researcher's institutional repository. It's the only mechanism that has a
clear scaling factor and demonstrated method for achieving near-100%
accessibility. Show me a better way and I'll happily embrace it, but in the
meantime I'll keep on reading what I can access and saving my research money
and time for things which really need them. I provide universal access to all
my articles. My colleagues should do the same and stop blaming anyone but
themselves and their institutions for the access problem, and stop being
distracted from the access problem by discussion of the affordability problem
or claims of no access problem by librarians (and others).
--
Professor Andrew A Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/
Stefan Busch
citation advantage are those conducted by Phil Davies, e.g.
http://www.fasebj.org/content/early/2011/03/29/fj.11-183988.full.pdf+htm
l . While the selection of articles here was randomized, the selection
of journals was not. The "participating journals" tended to be
high-impact ones, effectively must-reads for the researchers in the
relevant discipline, or even beyond, meaning that practically all those
in a position to contribute to the citation count had read the articles.
Hence no surprise that there was no meaningfully higher citation rate
for articles for which the subscription barrier had been lifted.
For journals that do not fall into the "must-read category", however,
there is a marked difference, or at least we - at BioMed Central -
observe a marked difference. Typically after 2 or 3 years after a
journal converts from TA to OA, i.e. when the impact factor (the one
everybody refers to) is based on two years' worth of OA, the IF tends to
go up significantly. More anecdotal evidence, yes, but necessarily so as
the only strictly non-anecdotal evidence for the OA citation effect is
impossible to deliver (working with the same set of articles ....). Over
the coming years, when there will be more data on journals whose
conversion to OA happened two or more years ago, there will be a raft of
such anecdotal evidence.
Stefan Busch
-----Original Message-----
From: goal-b...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-b...@eprints.org] On
Behalf Of Andrew A. Adams
Sent: 23 March 2012 09:08
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Subject: [GOAL] Re: Tireless Ad Hoc Critiques of OA Study After OA
Study: Will Wishful Thinking Ever Cease?
> Is it really common sense? You write: "Not only is OA research
> downloaded and cited more -- as common sense would expect, as a result
> of making it accessible free for all, rather than just for those whose
> institutions can afford a subscription".
>
> First, downloaded more - I can agree. But cited more? This might be an
> entire different matter. Usually, as common sense would expect,
> researchers will cite. The general public, however, will not cite -
> they do not publish research articles. Given that researchers have
> "more" access than the general public, due to the access policies of
> their institution (paid-for-access, open-access, access-by-delivery),
> the citations to articles will not be hampered by
> accessibility. Because when it comes to citing an article, a serious
> researcher has to read it. And to read it, means: getting access, in
> one way or another.
Jan,
You are putting the cart before the horse here. A decision to cite
depends
(when the researcher is doing their job properly) on being able to read.
Only
after an article has been read can the decision to cite or not come into
it.
For some articles it may be plain from what is toll-fre accesible (the
title
for pretty much all articles, the abstract for almost all) that an
article is
important enough to pay whatever price is demanded for access in order
to
read it and then perhaps to cite it. Given that the cost for an article
to
which one has no institutional subscription access is usually, in my
experience, $30+ for access, then in most cases I would expect
researchers to
look for alternative articles to read on a topic in which they are
looking
for relevant material. Those alternative articles will be one to which
their
institution has a subscription or those for which an OA version is
easily
available (typically through a search engine though also through web
links
and through repository browsing and other routes).
If one works in a narrow field one is likely to have access to the small
number of journals one needs. The broader one's field, and for
interdisciplinary researchers this is a particular problem, the less
likely
it is that one's institution has a relevant subscription.
My own approach is certainly this. When looking at an area of research I
use
various methods of finding apparently-appropriate material, which I then
delve deeper into, spiralling in on what is available to me (through
subscription or OA) and reading a little bit more at each stage until I
get
to the point of reading a whole article before perhaps citing it. If I
don't
have access to the article, it doesn't even get added to my citaton
database
- what would be the point? I can't cite it if I can't read it and I have
never paid for access to an inividual article --- I check for a version
I can
access, subscription or OA, then email the author if I can to ask for an
eprint, but if that fails I abandon the idea of reading that article and
move
on. There's more published in my area than I could read all of so I read
and
then cite from what's available to me.
Anecdote not evidence, sure, but the large amounts of data on OA
increasing
citation rates does seem clear - in all significantly sized studies with
appropriately chosen sets of articles, those that are available without
cost
to any and all potential citers are more often cited than those for whom
potential citers are limited to those in institutions with subscription
access to that article or those persuaded sight unseen to pay for access
to
that specific article.
--
Professor Andrew A Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/
Stevan Harnad
integrity I am in no way calling into question!) has replied to my
query:
"Where on earth did Henk get the idea that some institutions'
self-archiving 'did not increase when their OA regime was transformed
from non-mandatory into mandatory'?"
http://editorsupdate.elsevier.com/2012/03/the-effect-of-open-access-upon-citation-impact/
Henk wrote to tell me that he got the idea from our
own paper! (Gargouri et al 2010, Figure 1)
http://www.plosone.org/article/slideshow.action?uri=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0013636&imageURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0013636.g001
The figure shows the self-archiving rates from 2002-2006 for four
mandated repositories, compared to the unmandated baseline
self-archiving rate of about 20% per year. The four mandated repositories
all have a self-archiving rate of about 60% for each of the six years.
Now where Henk got the idea that the mandates may not increase self-archiving
was from the fact that the date on which the mandate was adopted differed
for the four repositories, the earliest mandate being in 2002, the latest in 2004.
So he inferred from the fact that the 2002-2006 rates were flat in all cases, that
some, at least, of the mandates did not increase self-archiving.
There are two important details that Henk did not take into account:
(1) The date is the date the articles were published, not the date they
were self-archived.
(2) When a mandate is adopted, the self-archiving is not just done for
articles published on or after the mandate: it is also done retroactively,
for articles published before the mandate, especially for recent years.
So the reason the self-archiving rates are flat is retroactive self-archiving.
A clue is already there in Figure 1, because both the post-mandate
self-archiving rates and the pre-mandate self-archiving rates are about
three times the baseline (unmandated) rates (60% vs 20%).
(The baseline rate was derived from comparing the percentage
of the articles that our robot found freely accessible on the web for the
reference sample of articles in each of the publication years for the
four mandated institutions with the percentage the robot found for
articles published in the same journals and years, but from other
institutions.)
The practice of retroactive self-archiving in the mandated repositories
was confirmed in a later study that we will soon report, comparing the
self-archiving rate for the same publishing years (from 2002 onward)
as sampled by our robot several years later: The percentage for each
year continued to grow years after adoption of the mandate.
One important thing to note, however, is that our estimate of the
self-archiving rate for mandated institutions was actually an
*underestimate*: We know the rates were higher than 60%, but
we used the noisier and less reliable robot method rather than
counting what was in the repository directly, in order to make the
estimates comparable with the robot's estimate for the unmandated
self-archiving rate. (The unmandated papers were not even
necessarily self-archived in the author's instituitional repository:
many were on their authors' personal or lab websites.)
Stevan Harnad