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Re: Open access and impact factor

At 17:47 09/03/04 -0500, Rick Anderson wrote:


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?

See the correlation generator
<http://citebase.eprints.org/java/correlation/correlation.html>
correlation between citation impact and usage impact ("hits")
(generated from Citebase <http://citebase.eprints.org/>)

This is a tool, not an opinion. Try it and make your own judgements.

This is our conclusion on one view:

"usage impact is correlated with citation impact, i.e. the more often a
paper is downloaded the more likely it is to be cited. This correlation is
highest for high-citation papers and authors."

<http://opcit.eprints.org/serials-short/serials11.html>

For other studies showing higher impact for open access, see
<http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3219.html>
And if so, how is the difference between those two impact factors meaningful or useful?
This question is best addressed to an author benefitting from higher
impact (more citations) through open access.

Steve Hitchcock
IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton SO17 1BJ,  UK
Email: sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel:  +44 (0)23 8059 3256     Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865