Re: Open access to research worth 1.5bn a year

["Donald Waters" <DJW@mellon.org>]

Friends,

I am not qualified to comment on the specifics of Mr. Harnad's various
numerical assumptions and calculations.  However, I am puzzled by at least
two conceptual issues in the argument that he summarizes in his reply to
Sally Morris below.

First, I can see why one might argue that citation of a research
publication represents a kind of "return on investment" in research.  
However, the logic of Mr. Harnad's argument escapes me when he insists in
Proposition #2 below that publication itself is not also a kind of return
on investment.  Mr. Harnad's use of "return on investment" is not at all
rigorously defined, but if you accept his usage for the common sense
assertion that it is, not only does the research publication surely
represent another kind of "return," it is a primary and immediate return
compared to a subsequent citation to the publication, which is secondary
and would likely emerge only over time.  If there are "returns on
investment" in research, then we are faced with a proposition requiring
careful analysis of multiple factors and their relative weighting over a
base of investment, not simply an "either/or" proposition as Mr. Harnad so
dismissively suggests.

Second, and more troubling, even if you allow for his black and white view
of the world, Mr. Harnad fails to provide any sort of rationale for why it
is reasonable and valid to impute a specific monetary value to a citation,
much less as a "return on investment" in an accounting system that
measures country-wide investment in research.  He simply assumes that it
has such value, takes a percentage difference in the quantity of citations
to published articles that are distributed in different ways, and applies
the difference to the assumed base value, which is the UK's annual
investment in research.  To identify a value for citations, why not apply
the percentage difference to the UK's gross national product, the annual
gross sales of research publications in the UK, the total salaries of
university researchers in the UK, or their total expenditures on
groceries?  An arbitrary application of percentages to an arbitrary base
value is hardly a disciplined way to calculate value.

In his original article, which appears at
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/28-guid.html, Mr. Harnad
does try to be more specific and refers to a 1986 article by A.M. Diamond
in the Journal of Human Resources entitled "What is a citation worth."  
Mr. Harnad points to a reprint of the Diamond article introduced by Eugene
Garfield at http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v11p354y1988.pdf,
but his adoption of the Diamond article is slavish and uncritical despite
the warnings contained both in Diamond's highly nuanced and qualified
article and especially in Garfield's introduction.

Diamond had examined the salary structures of university professors and
roughly estimated that the marginal value of a citation fell at the time
within the range of US$50-1,300 of additional salary.  For his own
purposes, Mr. Harnad simply takes this estimate out of context converts it
to pound sterling, inflates it to current value, and multiplies it by the
number of citations that authors presumably lose by failing to
self-archive.  However, in the introduction to the Diamond article,
Garfield cautions emphatically against just such a usage.

Garfield points out that Diamond "is not saying that every additional
citation is worth 'X' amount of dollars" and then continues:  "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
that there is any simple, automatic connection between citations and
salaries.  There is no real evidence of such a causal connection.  
Rather, as Harriet Zuckerman, Department of Sociology, Columbia University
points out, from Diamond's findings we can conclude that citations can be
regarded 'as a kind of "proxy" for certain services for which scientists
and scholars get paid.'"

Mr. Harnad may well be on to an important subject and line of argument in
suggesting that citations are a kind of return on investment.  However,
close inspection of the concepts and logic of his argument suggests that
he is quite a bit further from proving his case than he seems to have
convinced himself that he is.

Don Waters             

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Thursday, September 22, 2005 7:05 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu; AmSci Forum
Subject: Re: Open access to research worth �1.5bn a year

On Wed, 21 Sep 2005, Sally Morris (ALPSP) wrote:

Re: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/16/free_access_research/

> Am I alone in failing completely to understand the basis for Stevan's
> calculation of the 1.5 bn?  It seems to be (hypothetical (and as far as
> I can follow, unexplained) figure) x (hypothetical figure) x
> (hypothetical figure).  Am I missing something?
> 
> Perhaps someone could explain it to me nice and slow...

Dear Sally, happy to oblige:

(1) The UK spends �3.5 billion pounds annually on funding UK research:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4620.html

(2) The return on that investment is not the number of UK articles
published (130,000 per year)
http://auth.athensams.net/?ath_dspid=ISI.PHL&ath_returl=http://isiknowledge.com/

(3) The return on that investment is the number of UK articles used,
built-upon, cited: 761,600 citations per year:
http://auth.athensams.net/?ath_dspid=ISI.PHL&ath_returl=http://isiknowledge.com/

(4) 15% of articles are self-archived worldwide, 85% are not:
http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/graphes/EtudeImpact.htm

(5) Self-archived articles have 50%-250% more citations:
http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/graphes/EtudeImpact.htm

(6) Hence, for 85% of its research output (�2.98 billion pounds worth)

(7) the UK is losing 50-250% of the potential return on its investment:
�1.49 - �7.44 billion pounds worth

(8) To be conservative, I used only the lower end of this estimate of the
UK's annual loss in potential return on it research investment: �1.5
billion pounds worth
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/29-guid.html

In other words, the fiction is not in the figures I have cited on the RCUK
investment in research and the empirical evidence for the loss of
potential return on that investment
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/28-guid.html

The fiction is all in Sally's own non-figures and non-evidence on
publishers' loss of potential revenues as a result of self-archiving:
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/20-guid.html

Stevan Harnad