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

["Ken Masters" <kmasters@ithealthed.com>]

Hi All

> 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?

Yup, sounds like the starting point for a lot of research and 
innovation - the starting point _only_.  You have a gut feel 
about something, maybe anecdotes, patterns seem to be emerging, 
maybe personal experience, maybe even just pure speculation ("I 
wonder if..."), and then you discover that no-one else seems to 
have noticed it, and there just aren't any published data. 
That's when you take the risk and do the research.  Until you've 
done that, however, it remains speculation.  If you want to forgo 
all the research and make a leap into the unknown (build that 
better mousetrap) - that's also ok, as long as you know that the 
greater leap, the greater the risk.  Nothing wrong with that - 
again, however, until you make that leap, you have nothing, 
except thumb-suck.

> What happens when you try to take a
> measurement too early, before the data has come in?

Then you take the risk.  In the case of OA and citations, the 
data exist.  No doubt, new data will come in all the time, and 
the evidence _may_ change, but until that happens, that's what we 
have.

Whether we should discuss OA as a replacement or not is another 
topic entirely - I'm not prescribing the debate that 'should' 
happen.  And I'm not sure that a broad sweep of the hand 
dismissing the entire conversation as pseudo-science helps 
terribly much, either.  Fact is, evidence on the relationship 
between OA publishing and citation was sought and found.

Regards

Ken

----

Dr. Ken Masters
Asst. Professor: Medical Informatics
Medical Education Unit
College of Medicine & Health Sciences
Sultan Qaboos University
Sultanate of Oman
E-i-C: The Internet Journal of Medical Education
____/\/********\/\____

> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Re: Open Access Citation Impact Advantage: weight of the
> evidence
> From: Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>
> Date: Fri, February 25, 2011 5:38 am
> To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
>
>
> 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