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Re: Open access to research worth

Prof. Harnad's calculation seems a little strained to me too...

Diamond did a decomposition of US faculty salaries and found a positive
correlation between salaries and citations... However, to my reading, it
is an explanatory variable not a causal variable... one cannot 'decompose'
forwards. In the introduction to the Diamond article that Prof. Harnad
points us to, it says: "Readers should be cautious in drawing certain
conclusions from Diamond's article. Diamond is not saying that every
additional citation is worth X amount of dollars. Economists are
interested in the structure of wages and in its components, and they
present their data to show that structure. Diamond does not claim that
there is any simple, automatic connection between citations and salaries. There is no real evidence of such a causal connection..." Salaries are not
set on the basis of citations... a 50% increase in citation for the 85% of
researchers that do not self-archive will not lead to them earning an
extra 2.5 million pounds. There would probably be a lot more
self-archiving if it would.

Prof. Harnad's second calculation (not using Diamond's numbers) relates
the value of citations to research funding. However, as I see it, there is
no necessary or direct relationship between the research funds input and
the impacts (outputs/outcomes). Knowledge has some unusual economic
characteristics. When you increase the components going into an automobile
factory by 10% you tend to get something close to a 10% increase in output
(cars). However, putting 5 people on the job would not necessarily have
given you the theory of relativity in 20% of the time it took Einstein. There is no simple relationship between the dollars in and the value of
the outputs, so there can be no simple relationship between RCUK
expenditure and the loss from potential citations.

I think there are ways to approach the potential economic and social
benefits of open access... through such mechanisms as estimating the value
of increasing the rate of accumulation of knowledge... but it is a far
from simple question.

John Houghton
--
Centre for Strategic Economic Studies (CSES)
Victoria University AUSTRALIA
John.Houghton@vu.edu.au
www.pobox.com/~houghton
www.cfses.com


On Fri, 23 Sep 2005, Stevan Harnad wrote:

On Thu, 22 Sep 2005, Peter Banks wrote:

> No, you are not missing something, Sally. The reporter who covered < this
> so uncritically and without analysis was the one missing something.

I am afraid that Peter Banks has either not read or has not quite
understood what I (as opposed to the reporter) actually wrote:
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/28-guid.html

> I am not trained as an economist, but Professor Harnad's analysis
> seems based on so many untested assumptions and leaps of logic that I
> am not sure what we can draw from it.
>
> In particular, the work of Diamond which Harnad uses to set the value
> of a citation was meant to quantify the value of a citation to the
> earnings of a professor, not the value to society. I am not sure how
> Harnad makes the jump from individual to collective benefit.

But Banks is quite right about Diamond's data. And in my own article I
make that point quite explicit: The Diamond calculation is a separate
calculation, based on the value of the citation to the earnings of the
professor, not to society:

"Self-archiving, as noted, increases citations by 50-250%...
the most conservative... of these estimates (50% citation increase
from self-archiving at 46 per citation)... translates into an
annual loss of 2, 541, 500 in revenue to UK researchers"

But then I also go on to say:

"But this [50-250%] 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 (yielding 130,000 articles x 5.6 =
761,600 citations), our conservative estimate would be a 50% x 85%
x 3.5.bn = 1.5bn worth of loss in potential research impact (323,680
potential citations lost). And that is without even considering the
wider loss in revenue from potential practical applications and usage
of UK research findings in the UK and worldwide, nor the still more
general loss to the progress of human inquiry."

So the Diamond estimate did not even enter into my estimate of the UK's
1.5bn worth of loss in potential research impact.

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