Re: The Paradox of Online Access

["Stevan Harnad" <amsciforum@gmail.com>]

MOD. NOTE: This Science study was also picked up with a note in a 
recent issue of the Economist.  Its author also noted that the 
effect is apparently true whether journals are available for pay 
or for free.

****

On 18-Jul-08, at 10:04 PM, Phil Davis wrote:

> Online availability of articles may shorten citation window, 
> lead to fewer articles being cited a new study released in 
> today's issue of Science suggests.
>
> Please see The Scholarly Kitchen for an analysis of this 
> article and to participate in the dialog: 
> http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2008/07/18/online-journal-paradox/
>
> Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and 
> Scholarship James A. Evans Science 18 July 2008: Vol. 321. no. 
> 5887, pp. 395 - 399 http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1150473

[Hyperlinked version of this posting:
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/443-guid.html]

     Evans, James A. (2008) Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of
Science and Scholarship Science 321(5887): 395-399
DOI:10.1126/science.1150473
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/321/5887/395

     Excerpt: "[Based on] a database of 34 million articles, their 
citations (1945 to 2005), and online availability (1998 to 
2005),... as more journal issues came online, the articles 
[cited] tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles 
were cited, and more of those citations were to fewer journals 
and articles... [B]rowsing of print archives may have [led] 
scientists and scholars to [use more] past and present 
scholarship. Searching online... may accelerate consensus and 
narrow the range of findings and ideas built upon."

Evans found that as more and more journal issues are becoming 
accessible online (mostly only the older back-issues for free), 
journals are not being cited less overall, but citations are 
narrowing down to fewer articles, cited more.

In one of the few fields where this can be and has been analyzed 
thoroughly, astrophysics, which effectively has 100% Open Access 
(OA) (free online access) already, Michael Kurtz too found that 
with free online access to everything, reference lists became (a 
little) shorter, not longer, i.e., people are citing (somewhat) 
fewer papers, not more, when everything is accessible to them. 
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005IPM....41.1395K 
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2000A%26AS..143...41K

The following seems a plausible explanation:

Before OA, researchers cited what they could afford to access, 
and that was not necessarily all the best work, so they could not 
be optimally selective for quality, importance and relevance. 
(Sometimes -- dare one say it? -- they may even have resorted to 
citing "blind," going by just the title and abstract, which they 
could afford, but not the full text, to which they had no 
subscription.)

In contrast, when everything becomes accessible, researchers can 
be more selective and can cite only what is most relevant, 
important and of high quality. (It has been true all along that 
about 80-90% of citations go to the top 10-20% of articles. Now 
that the top 10-20% (along with everything else in astrophysics), 
is accessible to everyone, everyone can cite it, and cull out the 
less relevant or important 80-90%.

This is not to say that OA does not also generate some extra 
citations for lesser articles too; but the OA citation advantage 
is bigger, the better the article -- the "quality advantage" -- 
(and perhaps most articles are not that good!).  Since the 
majority of published articles are uncited (or only self-cited), 
there is probably a lot published that no amount of exposure and 
access can render worth citing! 
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11688/

(I think there may also exist some studies [independent of OA] on 
"like citing like" -- i.e., articles tending to be cited more at 
their own "quality" level rather than a higher one. 
[Simplistically, this means within their own citation bracket, 
rather than a higher one.] If true, this too could probably be 
analyzed from an OA standpoint.)

But the trouble is that apart from astrophysics and high energy 
physics, no other field has anywhere near 100% OA: It's closer to 
15% in other fields. So apart from a global correlation (between 
the growth of OA and the average length of the reference list), 
the effect of OA cannot be very deeply analyzed in most fields 
yet.

In addition, insofar as OA is concerned, much of the Evans effect 
seems to be based on "legacy OA," in which it is the older 
literature that is gradually being made accessible online or 
freely accessible online, after a long non-online, non-free 
interval. Fields differ in their speed of uptake and citation 
latencies. In physics, which has a rapid turnaround time, there 
is already a tendency to cite recent work more, and OA is making 
the turnaround time even faster.

In longer-latency fields, the picture may differ. For the 
legacy-OA effect especially, it is important to sort fields by 
their citation turnaround times; otherwise there can be biases 
(e.g. if short- or long-latency fields differ in the degree to 
which they do legacy OA archiving). 
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10713/

If I had to choose between the explanation of the Evans effect as 
a recency/bandwagon effect, as Evans interprets it, or as an 
increased overall quality/selectivity effect, I'd choose the 
latter (though I don't doubt there is a bandwagon effect too). 
And that is even without going on to point out that Tenopir & 
King, Gingras and others have shown that -- with or without OA -- 
there is still a good deal of usage and citation of the legacy 
literature (though it differs from field to field).

I wouldn't set much store by "skimming serendipity" (discovery of 
adjacent work while skimming through print issue), since online 
search and retrieval has at least as much scope for serendipity. 
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#21.Serendipity

Are online and free online access broadening or narrowing 
research? They are broadening it by making all of it accessible 
to all researchers, focusing it on the best rather than merely 
the accessible, and accelerating it.

Stevan Harnad
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/