Re: Open Access Citation Impact Advantage: weight of the evidence

[Velterop <velterop@gmail.com>]

The idea of an OA citation advantage is - and has been from the 
start - a complete red herring. If the benefit of OA is reduced 
to a citation advantage, it is doomed to fail. OA is about making 
the fruits of scholarly research more widely useful, even beyond 
the ivory towers of the traditional academic ego-systems.

'Prestige' may be gained from citations, but the 'usefulness' of 
an article is not determined by the citations it gets. In more 
applied areas of science, there may even be an inverse 
relationship between usefulness and "impact as measured by 
citations." Areas such as tropical diseases, for instance. The 
lack of an unambiguously clear OA citation advantage (in spite of 
frantic attempts to show there is) might well come from the 
relatively large proportion of OA articles being in just those 
practical, applied fields, where articles are used in the field 
(take that literally) rather than cited. Maybe someone on this 
list has the time to find out. And if those articles are 'cited', 
it is more likely to be in an email from one researcher to 
another: "You must read this, Joe, it's really useful. I'm 
attaching the article; it's OA."

Jan Velterop

On 22/02/2011 22:32, Sandy Thatcher wrote:

> I hope Heather is not seriously making the claim that truth is
> established by the greater number of articles that purport to
> prove a citation advantage.
>
> What makes sense to me is that the highest-publishing authors are
> located in those institutions that still can afford to subscribe
> to a wide range of periodicals, and citations by them would
> therefore be unaffected by OA.
>
> The greater the cancellation of journals, however, the more even
> those scientists would be affected and the more OA could be
> expected to make a difference.
>
> Sandy Thatcher