Re: RECENT MANUAL MEASUREMENTS OF OA AND OAA

[David Goodman <dgoodman@Princeton.EDU>]

I will be glad to see our work continued. I have no emotional 
commitment to any particular value of OAA. It's the value we 
determined, not our value.

Others may be unwise enough to judge OA on the basis of the OAA. 
I do have an emotional committment to OA, and I share Stevan's 
opinion of those who use the value as a cause for rejecting OA. 
The excellent reasons for using OA do not depend on it, as 
previously outlined many times on many lists. OAA measurements, 
however, have already proven so unpersuasive that determining the 
value more accurately might not have much practical effect. I 
urge Stevan to return to the advocacy of OA.

David Goodman, Ph.D., M.L.S.
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
and formerly
Princeton University Library

dgoodman@liu.edu

----- Original Message -----
From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Sunday, January 22, 2006 9:38 pm
Subject: Re: RECENT MANUAL MEASUREMENTS OF OA AND OAA
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu

> Before anyone gets too excited about the tiny Goodman et al. 
> test result, may I suggest waiting a couple of weeks, when we 
> will be reporting the results of a far bigger and more accurate 
> test of the robot's accuracy?
>
> Those who (for some reason) were hoping that the robot would 
> prove too inaccurate and that the findings on the OA advantage 
> would prove invalid may be disappointed with the outcome. I can 
> already say that overinterpretations of the tiny Goodman et al. 
> test as showing that the OA/OAA findings to date are 
> "worthless" are rather overstated even on the meagre evidence 
> to date, especially since two thirds of the published findings 
> on the OA citation advantage are not even robot-based!.
>
> (This shrillness also seems to me to be trying to make rather 
> much out of having actually done rather little!)
>
> As to the separate issue of how to treat the OA journal article 
> counts (as opposed to the counts for the self-archived non-OA 
> journal articles): We count it all, of course, but only use the 
> non-OA journal article counts in calculating the OA advantage, 
> because those are (necessarily) within-journal ratios, and 
> citation ratios of zero and infinity are meaningless. Think 
> about it.
>
> And as to the (completely independent) question of the multiple 
> factors that generate the OA citation advantage, see:
>
>     OA Impact Advantage = EA + (AA) + (QB) + QA + (CA) + UA
>
> http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/29-guid.html
>
> May I close by noting in passing that it is quite remarkable how
> quantities of positive results across the past two years have
> elicited no particular theoretical or methodological interest,
> but one tiny hint of a possible negative outcome pulls out all
> the pundits!
>
> Stay tuned.
>
> Stevan Harnad