RE: Usage of Open Access articles

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

I think Steve Hitchcock's conclusion is correct, but his arguments show
only that increased use ought to be the case, not that it actually is.

Although citedness is only one aspect of use, an increased citedness (OA
advantage) has been demonstrated by the extensive work at Southampton
<http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study> and independently by Kristin
Antelman. <http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/staff/kantelman/do_open_access_CRL.pdf>

It needs thoughtful interpretation, however, since it has been shown by
Michael Kurtz <http://arXiv.org/abs/cs/0503029> that in at least one
subject it is primarily a time advantage--OA articles are more visible
sooner.  In other subjects, such might not be the case, as Stevan Harnad
just reminded us on this list in his response to Joe Exposito's article.

Other measures of use are possible, and the systematic collection of
conventional use (downloading) data for OA articles is under
investigation.

But the true point is that we would only be measuring a transitory
phenomenon, since "the OA advantage will shrink once we reach 100% OA"
(SH, op cit. ) Stevan's further remark that it will increase overall
readership may not seem obvious, because article reading is probably
limited by the time available. However, the less cumbersome operation as
compared to the present fragmented system should actually increase the
time available for productive reading.  There is no reason to continue a
system where the reader has to figure out an acces route, and cannot be
sure of finding one that will be fast and easy.

Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgoodman@liu.edu


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu on behalf of Steve Hitchcock
Sent: Thu 6/23/2005 10:47 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Usage of Open Access articles
 
At 00:21 23/06/2005, Joseph Esposito wrote:
>There are many reasons to support OA, but increased use of scholarly
>materials is not among them.

Open access will *always* increase usage. That is the whole point. It
benefits authors (more readings, more citations) and it benefits everyone
who wishes to use an OA paper. Everything else flows from this.

How can I be sure that any OA paper will get more usage, certainly no less
usage, than if it were not OA, even against the publishers'
Google-dependent marketing juggernaut that Joe sees in prospect (quite how
long it's taken people to realise this is another matter)? Because any OA
version of a paper is in ADDITION to the peer-reviewed published version.  
...

Steve Hitchcock 
IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK 
Email: sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk