Measuring cumulating research impact loss across fields and time

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

On Tue, 25 Nov 2003, [identity deleted] wrote:

> Dear Prof. Harnad,
> 
> Do you have any notes that go with your Open Access PowerPoint presentation 
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/openaccess.ppt
> - specifically in the slide 25/52 (Quo usque tandem  
> patientia nostra?) where does the data come from for the 2 graphs -  
> "What we stand to gain" and "Yearly, Monthly, Daily Impact Losses" come  
> from and how has it been calculated?
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0025.gif

It is based on the 336% impact-loss estimate from the Lawrence study
(bottom-left corner). It simply cumulates that impact-loss to show how big
it really is, and how it is growing with time.

With collaborators at UQaM, Southampton, Oldenburg and Loughborough we are
now extending the Lawrence study (which was on a sample from computer
science) to the entire 10-year ISI database from 1992-2002 (about ten
million articles) across all disciplines, in order (1) to show the
relative growth of open access across time, by discipline, and (2) to
estimate the relative impact advantage (in terms of citation counts) that
open access provides, across time, by discipline.

Our method is first to compute the citation count for each of the ten
million articles indexed in the ISI database (using an algorithm that
takes each indexed article's reference list and fuzzy-matches each cited
article to the article it cites, whenever that too is in the database).
Then we send a software agent to the web to check, for each of those ten
million articles (again by fuzzy-matching), whether a full-text of it is
accessible toll-free on the web.

We then compare, display and extrapolate, year by year, field by field,
journal by journal, (1) the number and (2) citation counts for articles
that are and are not openly accessible.

These will be the actual data, replacing the Lawrence estimate in that
slide. We will then convert those impact losses into research income
losses for universities and research institutions, and use those data to
show university administrators, quantitatively, why it is that they need
to extend existing "publish or perish" policy to "publish *and* provide
open access to your publications" (in order to maximize research impact --
and income).

The hypothesis is that the only thing holding back immediate universal
open-access provision by researchers and their institutions today is
ignorance about (1) the magnitude of the needless accumulating impact
losses, and about (2) the simple, legal, and virtually cost-free way that
those losses can be immediately reversed through the dual open-access
strategy of (i) publishing in an open-access journal wherever a suitable
one exists (5%), and (ii) self-archiving all toll-access publications
otherwise (95%).

Meanwhile, keep using those powerpoints to encourage open-access
provision!

Stevan Harnad