Re: Whether Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research

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

On 11-Jan-10, at 6:03 PM, Joseph Esposito wrote:

> This is tiresome.
>
> There is no OA Advantage not because of the merits or 
> limitations of OA but because all these purported advantages 
> and disadvantages are based on the pseudo-science of 
> quantifying what is not entirely quantifiable.

It's not really "science," it's just counting and some 
statistics. Science is rather deeper than that.

But OA articles are indeed cited more. And we have now shown that 
making articles OA causes the higher citeability, rather than the 
higher citeability causing them to be made OA.

What is relevant is whether it is true, not whether it is 
tiresome.

> Citation count or page views or downloads or whatever are 
> useful *approximations* of some qualities of materials, but an 
> approximation is not the same thing as the underlying value, 
> which is subject to various interpretations.

All quantitative measures are approximations, some closer and 
better approximations than others.

All data are subject to interpretations, some better than others.

> You might as well base a college admissions program on the sole 
> criterion that a math score of 710 is unquestionably better 
> than one of 700.

The point here is lost on me. Presumably picking candidates with 
scores of 700 over candidates with scores of 600 can be 
reasonable (ceteris paribus). The rest is just about the 
closeness of the approximation.

> These comments apply to subscription-based publishing as well 
> as to OA publications.

Citations (and other quantitative measures) are widely used, for 
a variety of purposes (some commercial). Neither citations nor 
the OA citation advantage is unique to (gold) OA publications. In 
fact, all of our data were based on non-OA publications, 
comparing articles published in the same non-OA journal/year that 
were or were not made (green) OA through author self-archiving. 
Gold OA journal articles were systematically excluded because 
there was no basis for comparison.

> I know the fashion is to shut down humanities departments or 
> simply to starve them (or at least all of the adjuncts who work 
> there) to death, but could we not reintroduce some judgment 
> into this discussion?

The point is again lost on me. The finding that mandated OA (for 
peer- reviewed journal articles) generates just as big an OA 
citation advantage as self-selected OA was not focused on 
humanities, particularly; it was true of all disciplines. And 
what does that have to do with shutting down departments?

> And while we are at it, how about a simple experiment:  those 
> who wish to publish with an OA service do so, and those who 
> don't, don't.

You got it almost right. But it's not about publishing with an OA 
"service." It's about making published articles (green) OA by 
self- archiving them. You may perhaps have heard that there is 
growing momentum from institutions as well as funders to mandate 
OA self- archiving. Well the new evidence that OA increases 
citations is meant to increase that momentum. Apologies if that 
news is tiresome...

Stevan Harnad