Re: Open Access: No Benefit for Poor Scientists

["Garai, Atanu" <atanugarai.lists@gmail.com>]

I think these are valid points. Some additional metrics pointed 
out by Stevan Harnad need to be taken into account in measuring 
the impact on developing countries, but I would also suggest that 
author's institutional affiliation together with subject will 
reveal much of the trend of citations. For me, it is very clear 
that top tier universities and institutions in Asia and Africa do 
have some kind of access to both OA and non-OA journals. For 
authors who are not affiliated to universities, like me, tend to 
consult various harvesters for articles in social sciences, but 
self-archiving in these fields are very limited, except economics 
to some degree.

Atanu Garai

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stevan Harnad" <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Friday, January 16, 2009 6:09 AM
Subject: Re: Open Access: No Benefit for Poor Scientists

> On 14-Jan-09, at 4:25 PM, Phil Davis wrote:
>
>> Open Access has a moral agenda: to increase the flow of
>> scientific information to researchers in developing nations.
>> Yet a new study suggests that authors in developing countries are
>> no more likely to write papers for Open Access journals and are
>> no more likely to cite Open Access articles.
>>
>> full article at:
>> http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2009/01/14/oa-developing-nations/
>
> Comparing OA/non-OA in Developing Countries
> [Fully hyperlinked version:
> http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/509-guid.html]
>
> "[A]n investigation of the use of open access by researchers from
> developing countries... show[s] that open access journals are not
> characterised by a different composition of authors than the
> traditional toll access journals... [A]uthors from developing
> countries do not citeopen access more than authors from developed
> countries... [A]uthors from developing countries are not more
> attracted to open access than authors from developed countries.
> [underscoring added]"(Frandsen 2009, J. Doc. 65(1))  (See also
> "Open Access: No Benefit for Poor Scientists")
>
> Open Access is not the same thing as Open Access Journals.
>
> Articles published in conventional non-Open-Access journals can
> also be made Open Access (OA) by their authors -- by
> self-archiving them in their own Institutional Repositories.
>
> The Frandsen study focused on OA journals, not on OA articles. It
> is problematic to compare OA and non-OA journals, because
> journals differ in quality and content, and OA journals tend to
> be newer and fewer than non-OA journals (and often not at the top
> of the quality hierarchy).
>
> Some studies have reported that OA journals are cited more, but
> because of the problem of equating journals, these findings are
> limited. In contrast, most studies that have compared OA and
> non-OA articles within the same journal and year have found a
> significant citation advantage for OA. It is highly unlikely that
> this is only a developed-world effect; indeed it is almost
> certain that a goodly portion of OA's enhanced access, usage and
> impact comes from developing-world users.
>
> It is unsurprising that developing world authors are hesitant
> about publishing in OA journals, as they are the least able to
> pay author/ institution publishing fees (if any). It is also
> unsurprising that there is no significant shift in citations
> toward OA journals in preference to non-OA journals (whether in
> the developing or developed world): Accessibility is a necessary
> -- not a sufficient -- condition for usage and citation: The
> other necessary condition isquality. Hence it was to be expected
> that the OA Advantage would affect the top quality research most.
> That's where the proportion of OA journals is lowest.
>
> The Seglen effect ("skewness of science") is that the top 20% of
> articles tend to receive 80% of the citations. This is why the OA
> Advantage is more detectable by comparing OA and non-OA articles
> within the same journal, rather than by comparing OA and non-OA
> journals.
>
> We will soon be reporting results showing that the within-journal
> OA Advantage is higher in "higher-impact" (i.e., more cited)
> journals. Although citations are not identical with quality, they
> do correlate with quality (when comparing like with like). So an
> easy way to understand the OA Advantage is as a quality advantage
> -- with OA "levelling the playing field" by allowing authors to
> select which papers to cite on the basis of their quality,
> unconstrained by their accessibility. This effect should be
> especially strong in the developing world, where
> access-deprivation is greatest. -- Stevan Harnad
>
> -----------