Re: Critique of OA metric

[Ahmed Hindawi <ahmed.hindawi@hindawi.com>]

I'd like to share the following comment that I posted on the blog
web site with the readers of this list:

Philip Davis makes two arguments here. He argues that the graph
of the relationship between price and quality would have looked
very different if all DOAJ indexed OA journals have been taken
into account (which I understand as he is expecting that the
positive correlation would have been negative). But then he also
argues that the positive correlation found in the current study
is evidence supporting the claim that OA scholarly journal
publishing is vanity publishing.

I have to ask myself what should the results of the study have
shown for Philip Davis to come to a different conclusion than the
one he already has in mind. Would a negative correlation (which
he expects if the study covered more journals) change his mind or
would a higher positive correlation (in case it turned out to be
the case if more journals were taken into account) change his
mind about the issue? It seems to be that he would have arrived
to his conclusion no matter what the data would have revealed.

Ahmed Hindawi

On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 11:47 PM, Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com> wrote:
> In another of his series of fine posts, Phil Davis has a good
> critique of some of the metrics for OA that are coming out of
> Harvard. Definitely worth a look:
>
> http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/
>
> Joe Esposito