Re: Open Access Citation Impact Advantage: weight of the evidence

[Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>]

What about when there is no evidence?  What about when you are 
doing something new, so there is no data to examine?  How about 
when you have to take a plunge on gut feeling, which is the case 
for all innovations?  What happens when you try to take a 
measurement too early, before the data has come in?  Can you tell 
if someone is a shortstop or left-fielder during the first month 
of pregnancy? Science is wonderful, but this thread and all these 
discussions about the open access advantage are pseudo-science. 
We should know better and focus not on OA as some kind of 
replacement for traditional journals publishing but for what it 
does uniquely, which is still evolving.

Joe Esposito

On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 5:11 PM, Heather Morrison 
<hgmorris@sfu.ca> wrote:

> Sandy Thatcher wrote:  I hope Heather is not seriously making the
> claim that truth is established by the greater number of articles
> that purport to prove a citation advantage.
>
> Comment:  my framework is the evidence based librarianship
> movement, inspired by evidence based medicine. It is not just the
> number of studies that is to be taken into account, but also such
> matters as sample size and rigor of the studies. The idea is to
> base decisions and recommendations on the full weight of
> available evidence.
>
> It is in this context that I assert that the weight of the
> evidence strongly supports an open access citation impact
> advantage.
>
> For more information on evidence based librarianship, see this
> overview article by Jonathan D. Eldredge in the Bulletin of the
> Medical Library Association:
> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC35250/
>
> Or, browse the open access peer-reviewed journal Evidence Based
> Library and Information Practice;
> http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP
>
> Heather Morrison, MLIS
> Doctoral Candidate, Simon Fraser University School of
> Communication
> http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/
> The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
> http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com