Re: Open access to research worth 1.5bn a year

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

On Mon, 3 Oct 2005, Thomas Krichel wrote:

> But Wren notes that a large number of the open access does not come from
> authors uploading them, but readers uploading them to share with others,
> but forgetting that they are then in open access. Thus, the correlation
> between high impact and open access maybe due to high impact articles
> beinng more widely read and incidently left on servers.
> 
> Wren's trophy effect may be entirely due to that "journal club" effect.
> Without a manual look at his data, it is hard to tell.

This explanation does not work, for example, for the results we have for Arxiv,
which has no 3rd-party archiving: http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/

Since we find exactly the same pattern for the web-wide studies, it is
unlikely that the underlying causes are very different:  
http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/graphes/EtudeImpact.htm

There are no doubt several factors contributing to the OA advantage,
Quality Bias (QB) (mostly from authors' preferential self-archiving of
their own higher-quality papers, but possibly also from 3rd-party
archiving of same) being one of the contributing factors. But it is
certainly not the only factor, and becomes a less and less plausible
hypothesis as the percentage of self-archiving in a field rises.

    "OA Impact Advantage = EA + (AA) + (QB) + QA + (CA) + UA"
    http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/29-guid.html

Stevan Harnad