Re: More on Open Access citations

["FrederickFriend" <ucylfjf@ucl.ac.uk>]

Joe,

I and many OA advocates would agree with you that there is 
over-emphasis upon numbers. From the beginning of the OA movement 
we have emphasised the very benefits for researchers you identify 
in your "home run" list. We got into a numbers game because the 
response to our advocacy of OA was "produce the evidence". Much 
more valuable is the approach several organizations are taking 
now in gathering "soft" evidence: success stories on blogs, or 
user experiences of OA on video, often coming from a very wide 
range of ages and backgrounds. These cover the benefits you 
identify in your "home run" list, benefits which relate closely 
to the needs of researchers, teachers and learners, and benefits 
which reflect the cultural nature of the growing switch to OA.

Fred Friend

-----Original Message----- From: Joseph Esposito
Sent: Wednesday, February 09, 2011 12:20 AM
To: Liblicense-L@Lists. Yale. Edu
Subject: More on Open Access citations

The question of whether or not Open Access leads to more
citations has come up again, this time in listmember Phil Davis"s
blog post:

http://bit.ly/gHpQF0

Since OA is as much a theological debate as it is a property of
one kind of publishing, it is hard to have reasoned discussion on
the topic.  Davis is a data hog of the first order and has to be
taken seriously.  The notion that Davis is somehow "anti-Open
Access" is nonesense.

Davis and I don"t agree about this matter on what I would call
temperamental grounds. I am myself uneasy with what I see as
excessive quantification, asking numbers to do what only human
judgment can.  I wrote about this some time ago:
http://bit.ly/8z1yMM.  Citation analysis gets you to the front
door, but it doesn"t let you inside.

Most people who disagree with Davis, however, also disagree with
me. So this is not a binary argument.  I remain puzzled that for
all the benefits of OA publishing, advocates continue to cling to
two arguments that are simply not true, that it lowers costs (to
whom?) and that it increases scientific impact (no evidence).
Why not discuss OA for what it does remarkably well?  It provides
a vehicle for a much broader display of research materials, lends
itself to emerging data-mining techniques, enables individual
authors to take greater control of the publication of their own
work, and provides a public venue for work that is highly
specialized and not likely to find a market by traditional means.
By these standards, OA is a home run.

Joe Esposito