Re: Open access and impact factor

["Sally Morris \(ALPSP\)" <chief-exec@alpsp.org>]

Interesting point.

Would it not be correct to assume that 'big deals' must be having the same
'distorting' effect?  If only 10 percent of users (let's not, for the
moment, get into how those users are defined) don't have access via a 'big
deal' to the journals of the biggest commercial publishers, surely those
will also be more highly cited than those to which far fewer have access
(e.g. because libraries have neither the time nor the budget to negotiate
with the little guys).  Thus the significance of the Impact Factor as a
measure of value (as opposed to visibility) is, perhaps, already being
diluted.  But of course 'Impact' means just that!

Sally Morris, Chief Executive
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
E-mail:  chief-exec@alpsp.org

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Rick Anderson" <rickand@unr.edu>
To: "Liblicense-L@Lists. Yale. Edu" <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, March 09, 2004 11:47 PM
Subject: Open access and impact factor

> Every time someone uses "enhanced impact factor" as an argument for open
> access, a tiny little bell goes off in the back of my head, and this
> morning I finally figured out why.  Stop me if this is a naive question or
> if I'm fundamentally misunderstanding the argument, but it seems to me
> that the purpose of impact factor data is to measure the importance of one
> article relative to others.  If the article's impact factor is enhanced by
> its free availability to the public (rather than by its intrinsic merits
> or its impact on the thinking and research of others), then isn't open
> access simply making the impact-factor data less meaningful?
>
> In other words, given two articles of equal merit and potential influence,
> one of which is freely available to the public and the other of which is
> only available to those who pay, wouldn't we expect that the impact of the
> former would be higher than that of the latter?  And if so, how is the
> difference between those two impact factors meaningful or useful?
>
> -------------
> Rick Anderson
> rickand@unr.edu