Re: Open access to research worth 1.5bn a year

[Thomas Krichel <krichel@openlib.org>]

Peter Banks writes

> While I agree that the Wren study is well done,

and it is a joy to read. For once somebody says clearly what he has done!

> it does not really address the question for which Dr. Harnad is trying
> to use it. Unlike Harnad's own research, which attempts to show that OA
> leads to more citation, Wren makes the complementary point: that
> citation leads to more OA. The existence of Wren's "Trophy Effect"
> neither proves nor disproves Harnad's contention that OA drives
> citations--and it certainly provides no evidence one way or the other
> for 50-250% being the magnitude of any such effect of OA on impact
> factor.

But Wren notes that a large number of the open access does not come from
authors uploading them, but readers uploading them to share with others,
but forgetting that they are then in open access. Thus, the correlation
between high impact and open access maybe due to high impact articles
beinng more widely read and incidently left on servers.

Wren's trophy effect may be entirely due to that "journal club" effect.
Without a manual look at his data, it is hard to tell.

Cheers,

Thomas Krichel                             mailto:krichel@openlib.org
                                      http://openlib.org/home/krichel
                                  RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel