Re: Surveys, self-archiving, and what authors want to do

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

On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 cmorgan@wiley.co.uk wrote:

> Alma Swan may claim that the survey is rigorous and meaningful, but its
> objectivity is rather undermined by the following introductory sentence:
> 
> "Studies show that open access increases the impact of - and number of
> citations to - work made accessible in this way."
> 
> Even if we set aside the contentiousness of the statement, it surely has
> no place in an introduction to an objective survey of authors' attitudes
> since it is leading the witness.
> 
> If you are asking for someone's opinion about something, surely you don't
> start off by making any claims as to the positive (or negative) aspects of
> the issue that you are surveying?
>
> Cliff Morgan, Chair, Serial Publishers Executive
> Academic and Professional Division of the Publishers Association

Very interesting observation. To see the how Cliff Morgan's vested
interests and wishful thinking might just be influencing his own
objectivity on the subject of surveys, consider the following (with
apologies for putting such a lurid turn on it, but sometimes it's
necessary in order to shake people into thinking seriously):

If one were doing a survey on the actual *practises* of smokers, as well
as their *attitudes* towards those facts (not their opinions as to what
those facts might be!), would one be undermining the objectivity of one's
survey by introducing it as arising from the *fact* that smoking causes
lung cancer?

As to the "contentiousness" of the statement that open access increases
impact, I suggest that Cliff have a good look at the growing number of
empirical studies of this phenomenon, all of which agree on the outcome.
That is better than to bury one's head in the sand, and hope the facts
will go away, or that researchers can and should be kept in pristine
ignorance of them as long as possible (as I don't doubt the tobacco
companies would have quite liked to do, in the name of objectivity, as
well as not undermining opinions with facts):

    Bibliography of OA Advantage Data
    http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html

Stevan Harnad