Re: Maximising the Return on UK's Public Investment in Research

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

  ** Apologies for cross-posting **

Press Release: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/news/792

         Maximising the Return on UK's Public Investment in Research

         Stevan Harnad
         Moderator, American Scientist Open Access Forum
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html

         Professor of Cognitive Science
         Department of Electronics and Computer Science
         University of Southampton
         SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM

         Chaire de recherche du Canada
         Centre de neuroscience de la cognition (CNC)
         Universite du Quebec a Montreal
         Montreal, Quebec,  Canada  H3C 3P8
         harnad@uqam.ca
         http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/

The United Kingdom is not yet maximising the return on its public
investment in research.  Research Councils UK (RCUK) spend 3.5 billion
pounds annually. The UK produces at least 130,000 research journal
articles per year, but it is not the number of articles published that
reflects the return on the UK's investment:  A piece of research, if it is
worth funding and doing at all, must be not only published, but used,
applied and built upon by other researchers. This is called 'research
impact' and a measure of it is the number of times an article is cited by
other articles ('citation impact').

But in order to be used and built upon, an article must first be accessed.
A published article is accessible only to those researchers who happen to
be at institutions that can afford to subscribe to the particular journal
in which it was published. There are 24,000 journals in all, and most
institutions can only afford a small fraction of them. In paper days,
authors used to supplement this paid access to their articles by mailing
free reprints to any would-be users who wrote to request them. The online
age has made it possible to provide free 'eprints' (electronic versions of
the author's draft) to all potential users who cannot afford the journal
version by 'self-archiving' them on the author's own institutional
website.

The online-age practice of self-archiving has been shown to increase
citation impact by a dramatic 50-250%, but so far only 15% of researchers
are doing it. A recent UK international survey has found that 95% of
authors would self-archive -- but only if their research funders or their
institutions required them to do it (just as they already require them to
'publish or perish'). The solution is hence obvious:

After lengthy deliberations first initiated in 2003 by the UK
Parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology, RCUK have
proposed to adopt a policy requiring UK researchers to deposit, on their
university's website, the final author's draft of any journal article
resulting from RCUK-funded research. The purpose of the proposed policy
would be to maximise the usage and impact of UK research findings by
making them freely accessible on the web ("open access") for any potential
users in the UK and worldwide who cannot afford paid access to the
published journal version.  How does this maximise the return on the UK
public investment in research?

It is not possible to calculate all the ways in which research generates
revenue. A good deal of it is a question of probability and depends on
time: Although everyone thinks of an immediate cure for cancer or a cheap,
clean source of energy as the kind of result we hope for, most research
progresses gradually and indirectly, and the best estimate of the size and
direction of its progress is its citation impact, for that reflects the
degree of uptake of research results by other researchers, in their own
subsequent research. Citation impact is accordingly rewarded by
universities (through salary increases and promotion) and by
research-funders like RCUK (through grant funding and renewal); it is also
rewarded by libraries (through journal selection and renewal, based on a
journal's average citation "impact factor"). Counting citations is a
natural extension of the cruder measure of research impact: counting
publications themselves ("publish or perish").

If citations are being counted, it is natural to ask how much they are
worth.

The marginal dollar value of one citation was estimated by Diamond in 1986
to range from $50-$1300 (US), depending on field and number of citations.
(An increase from 0 to 1 citation is worth more than an increase from 30
to 31; most articles are in the citation range 0-5.) If we convert from
dollars to UK pounds sterling (27-710) and update by 170% for inflation
from 1986-2005, this yields the range 46-$1207 as the marginal value of a
UK citation today. Self-archiving, as noted, increases citations by
50-250%, but, as also noted, only 15% of the articles being published are
being self-archived today.

We will now apply only the most conservative ends of these estimates (50%
citation increase from self-archiving at 46 per citation) to the UK's
current annual journal article output (and only for the approximately
130,000 UK articles a year indexed by the Institute for Scientific
Information, which covers only the top 8000 of the world's 24,000
journals). If we multiply by the 85% of the UK's annual journal article
output that is not yet self-archived (110, 500 articles), this translates
into an annual loss of 2, 541, 500 in revenue to UK researchers for not
having done (or delegated) the few extra keystrokes per article it would
have taken to self-archive their final drafts.

But this impact loss translates into a far bigger one for the British
public, if we reckon it as the loss of potential returns on its research
investment. As a proportion of the RCUK's yearly 3.5bn research
expenditure, our conservative estimate would be a 50% x 85% x 3.5.bn =
1.5bn worth of loss in potential research impact. And that is without even
considering the wider loss in revenue from potential usage and
applications of UK research findings in the UK and worldwide, nor the
still more general loss to the progress of human inquiry.

The solution is obvious, and it is the one the RCUK is proposing: to
extend the existing universal 'publish or perish' requirement to 'publish
and also self-archive your final draft on your institutional website'.
Over 90% of journals already endorse author self-archiving and the
international author survey -- plus the actual experience of the two
institutions that have already adopted such a requirement (CERN and
University of Southampton ECS ) -- has shown that over 90% of authors will
comply.

The time to close this 50%-250% research impact gap is already well
overdue. This is the historic moment for the UK to set an example for the
world , showing how to maximise the return on the public investment in
research in the online era.

How self-archiving increases citation impact:
http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html

How much a citation is worth:
http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v11p354y1988.pdf

How much time and effort is involved in self-archiving
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/

RCUK self-archiving policy proposal:
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/index.asp

Directory of publishers' policies on author self-archiving:
http://romeo.eprints.org/

JISC user survey on self-archiving:
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11006/

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