UK scholarly journals: An evidence-based analysis (by RIN/EPS)

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

Critique of:
       UK scholarly journals: 2006 baseline report
         An evidence-based analysis of data concerning
         scholarly journal publishing.
         http://www.rin.ac.uk/data-scholarly-journals

         Prepared on behalf of the Research Information Network,
         Research Councils UK and the Department of Trade & Industry
         By Electronic Publishing Services Ltd http://www.epsltd.com
         In association with Professor Charles Oppenheim and LISU at
         Loughborough University Department of Information Science

Summary only. Full hyperlinked version of this critique is 
available at:
     http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/142-guid.html

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SUMMARY: The above Report on UK Scholarly Journals was 
commissioned by RIN, RCUK and DTI, and conducted by ELS, but its 
questions, answers and interpretations are clearly far more 
concerned with the interests of the publishing lobby than with 
those of the research community. The Report's two relevant 
overall findings are correct and stated very fairly in their 
summary form:

        [1] "Overall, [self-archiving] of articles in open access
        repositories seems to be associated with both a larger
	number of citations, and earlier citations for the items
	deposited....The reasons for this [association] have not
	been clearly established - there are many factors that
	influence citation rates... Consistent longitudinal data
	over a period of years... would fill this gap."

	[2] "There is no evidence as yet to demonstrate any
	relationship (or lack of relationship) between
	subscription cancellations and repositories... Proving or
	disproving a [causal] link between availability in
	self-archived repositories and cancellations will be
	difficult without long and rigorous research."

	The obvious empirical and practical conclusion to draw
	from the finding that (1) all the self-archiving evidence
	to date is positive for research and that (2) none of the
	self-archiving evidence to date is negative for
	publishing) would have been that the research community
	should now apply and extend these findings -- by applying
	and extending self-archiving (through self-archiving mandates)
	to all UK research output, along with consistent,
	rigorous longtitudinal studies over a period of years, to
	test (1) whether the positive effect on citations
	continues to be present (and why) and (2) whether the
	negative effect on subscriptions continues to be absent.

	But instead, the two overall findings are hedged with volumes
	of special pleading, based mostly on wishful thinking, to
	the effect that (1') the observed relationship between
	self-archiving and citations may not be causal, and that
	(2') there may exist an as-yet-unobserved causal
	relationship between self-archiving and cancellations
	after all.

     	Even that would be alright, if this Report's conclusions
	were coupled with a clear endorsement of the proposed
	self-archiving mandates, so that the competing hypotheses
	can be put to a rigorous long-term test.  But the only
	test the commissioners of this Report seem to be
	interested in conducting is "Open Option" publishing,
	i.e., authors paying publishers to make their article OA
	for them, instead of self-archiving it for themselves.
	This would certainly be a nice way to hold author
	self-archiving and institution/funder self-archiving
	mandates at bay for a few years more, while at the same
	time protecting publishers from undemonstrated risk of
	revenue loss. But it would also leave global unmandated
	self-archiving to continue to languish at the current
	spontaneous 15% rate that the self-archiving mandates had
	been meant to drive up to 100%. And it would leave
	research unprotected from its demonstrated risk of
	impact loss. The option of having to pay to provide OA is
	certainly not likely to enhance the unmandated rate of
	uptake by authors (though I'm sure publishers would have
	no quarrel with funder mandates to provide OA coupled
	with the funds to pay publishers' asking price for paid
	OA, as provided by the Wellcome Trust).

	The longterm test will nevertheless be conducted,
	because four out of eight UK Research Councils have
	already mandated self-archiving. Their citation rates and
	their cancellation rates can then be compared with those
	for the four that have not mandated self-archiving (and
	whose authors hence do it spontaneously by
	"self-selection"). Alas this will be mostly comparing
	apples and oranges (e.g. MRC vs AHRC), and it will
	needlessly be depriving the oranges of several more
	years of potential growth enhancement. My guess is that
	all the other councils -- except possibly the paradoxical
	EPSRC (which evidently thinks, with the publishing lobby,
	that there's still some sort of pertinent pretesting to
	be done for a few more years here) -- will come to their
	senses long before that, unpersuaded by Reports like this
	one.

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