RE: Open access and impact factor

["David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>]

I certainly agree with Heather and Michelle, as my previous positings will
have made obvious. Spine appears to be published by LWW on behalf of a
number of scientific and medical societies, which apparently are solely
concerned with the interest of their own members, who have subscriptions.
This is not responsible science.  That we should be all be spending our
time over providing mere physical access to electronic items, whose
distribution costs are negligible, is the combined disgrace of the
publishers, societies, authors, universities, and libraries.

I'd like to make some incidental observations though:

First, for Spine to not make the epages available is not good practice.
Good practice is that electronic-only supplements are free to all, even if
the articles aren't. This avoids exactly this sort of situation.

Second, almost all ejournal licenses permit making copies.  That most ILL
departments do not make them is the combined fault of the confusion
generated by the variable policies of the publishers, and the poor work of
most ILL librarians, who do not check.

Third, there are many other ways to get the article. The best is to check
the authors home page. At worst, most libraries in such a case would pay
LWW or CISTI to buy the article for the patron--the true cost is not much
higher than ILL.

Fourth, a more general remark: The discussion over the effect on impact
that has been taking place, including my part in it, should have
emphasized that the OA status is _not_ going to be the major determinant
of the impact of a journal, as measured by citations or by use numbers.
The major factor will remain the quality of the articles.
 
Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgoodman@liu.edu

-----Original Message-----
From:	Heather Morrison [mailto:heatherm@eln.bc.ca]
Sent:	Wed 3/17/2004 8:06 PM
To:	liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject:	Re: Open access and impact factor

Restricting access probably does distort the potential for impact/usage at
least as much as either the big deal or open access.  Or, to put in
another way, it makes sense that the accessibility of scholarly
information would have an impact on its potential impact/usage.  One might
argue that open access is the least distorting model.  That is, if all
scholarly information is readily available, then impact/usage should be as
closely related to the actual value of the information as it can be in
this imperfect world.

Heather Morrison

On 16-Mar-04, at 6:38 PM, Michelle Kraft wrote:

> I have been reading this discussion with some interest.  I have a 
> question regarding unavailability of certain articles and impact 
> factors.
>
> Take for instance the journal Spine.  We have a subscription to the
> journal, but it contains quite a few articles in the epages that are
> popular.  Unfortunately, we can not afford an institutional site 
> license to Spine, which means we cannot access their epages.  We are 
> usually unsuccessful in getting the article through ILL because many 
> libraries do not ILL journal epages.  Therefore, we have to go back to 
> our patron and tell them we cannot get that article.  The only way the 
> patron can get the article is buy it themselves or find a friend with a 
> subscription to Spine.
>
> So while all have been talking about the relative nature of impact 
> factors on open access articles, I am curious as to know what one would 
> find with the impact factors on restricted articles like those similar 
> to Spine's epages.
> ___________________
> Michelle Kraft
> kraftm@ccf.org