prediction: exponential increase in citations to open access articles

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

Heather Morrison <heatherm@eln.bc.ca> wrote:

> I would like to submit a prediction that there will be an exponential
> increase in citations to open access articles...  Of course, there would
> be no way to measure this prediction at the present time.  It might be
> interesting to have a look at some numbers around 2011 or so

That providing Open Access to an article dramatically increases its
citations has already been tested, and it begins immediately (with
downloads, which correlate with and predict downloads 6-24 months later:
http://citebase.eprints.org/analysis/correlation.php ).

For this already dramatic increase in citations to become "exponential"
what is needed is not just more time for these articles (citations fall
off with time for most articles, as research moves on), but an exponential
increase in the number of articles for which Open Access is provided.
Alas, however, the expectation that the number of articles for which Open
Access is provided will increase exponentially of its own accord has
already been falsified:

(1) One of the oldest open-access archives, Arxiv, has been growing with
self-archived articles since 1991. The increase has been unrelenting
linear, not exponential, and this has now been going on for over 12 years:

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0043.gif

Heather is right that what is *needed* is exponential (actually,
sigmoidal) growth, but the mere fact that more authors are self-archiving,
even coupled with the growing evidence of the dramatic increase in
citation impact that self-archiving generates

    Brody, T., Stamerjohanns, H., Vallieres, F., Harnad, S. Gingras,
    Y., & Oppenheim, C. (2004) The effect of Open Access on Citation
    Impact. Presented at: National Policies on Open Access (OA) Provision
    for University Research Output: an International meeting, Southampton,
    19 February 2004.  http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/OATAnew.pdf

is not in itself enough to generate the requisite sigmoidal growth.
Moreover, the critical ingredient that is still missing is already known
too. Swan & Brown (2004), for example, put their finger on it when they

    "asked authors to say how they would feel if their employer or funding
    body required them to deposit copies of their published articles in
    one or more... repositories. The vast majority... said they would do
    so willingly."

    Swan, A. & Brown, S.N. (2004) JISC/OSI Journal Authors Survey
    Report.  
    http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/JISCOAreport1.pdf
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3628.html

So there you have it. No point sitting waiting for Godot. That wait would
take till Doomsday. Universities (and research-funders) need to extend
their existing publish-or-perish policies to include Open Access provision
for those published-but-perishable journal-articles!

The following call for an Institutional Commitment to implementing the
Budapest Open Access Initiative and the Berlin Declaration on open-access
provision is soon to be formally launched (universities can already
pre-sign):

    http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php

The above item 
http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/links.html
is on the agenda for the Berlin-2 conference on May 12 at CERN
http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-cern/
but there is some risk that that conference will merely generate
a one-sided call for institutions to commit themselves to funding
open-access ["gold"] journal publication costs, which would be a great
missed-opportunity for open access. 

It is to be hoped that the adoption of the above unified open-access
provision policy rather than merely a call to fund open-access journals
will be the outcome of that meeting (which was unfortunately convened far
too hastily to allow many of the invitees, including myself, to attend:
notification was only one month in advance!).

Gold journals represent only about 1000/24000 journals (5%)
http://www.doaj.org/ whereas the evidence is that the percentage of Green
Journals -- those that have already given their official "green light" to
author self-archiving -- rose from 55% to 83% between 2003 and 2004! (The
exact figures are still being checked, but four different estimates have
so far confirmed their correctness.)

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0036.gif
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0037.gif

I don't know whether this growth spurt in the proportion of Green journals
is exponential, but it does make it quite clear that publishers are *not*
(and never have been) the barrier to Open Access! The Green ones have now
even demonstrated formally their support for the Open Access that authors
purport to want and need so much. It is now up to universities and
research-funders to ensure that their authors take all these well-meaning
publishers up on their self-archiving-friendliness -- to the lasting
benefit of themselves, their institutions, and of research itself.

> From: Fred.Jenkins@notes.udayton.edu
> 
> While convenenience and accessibility are important, one would think the
> most important thing in judging an article is its content, not whether all
> of the citations are "clickable."  As for the citations, they should cover
> relevant literature based on its value and importance for the article, not
> its format.  Sloth is always with us, but it should not be allowed to pass
> for good scholarship.

Access is not a sufficient condition for citation and impact, but it is
certainly a *necessary* condition for it! Would-be users at institutions
that cannot afford the access-tolls to any given article in any given
journal all represent lost research impact. It is a fact-of-life for
*every single one* of the 2.5 million articles published annually in the
world's 24,000 peer-reviewed journals that *most* of its potential users
cannot access it. To deduce this fact, one need only consult (1) Ulrichs
http://www.ulrichsweb.com/ulrichsweb/analysis/ for the number of journals
and (2) the ARL institutional statistics
http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/arlbin/arl.cgi?task=setuprank for
the shrinking fraction of them that even the wealthiest institutions can
afford.

Stevan Harnad