On 2011-03-30, at 1:12 PM, Philip Davis wrote:
Published today in The FASEB Journal, we report the findings of our
randomized controlled trial of open access publishing on article
downloads and citations. This study extends a prior study of 11
journals in physiology (Davis et al, BMJ, 2008) reported at 12months
to 36 journals covering the sciences, social sciences and humanities
at 3yrs. Our initial results are generalizable across all subject
disciplines: open access increases article downloads but has no
effect on
articlecitations....http://www.fasebj.org/content/early/2011/03/29/fj.11-183988.abstra
ctÂ
You may expect a routine cut-and-paste reply by S.H. shortly...Â
IÂ see the world as a more complicated and nuanced place than through
the lens of advocacy.
Sorry to disappoint! Nothing new to cut-and-paste or reply to:Â
Still no self-selected self-archiving control, hence no basis for the
conclusions drawn (to the effect that the widely reported OA citation advantage
is merely an artifact of a self-selection bias toward self-archiving the better,
hence more citeable articles -- a bias that the randomization eliminates).Â
http://bit.ly/Davis-Control
If and when the requisite self-selected self-archiving control is ever tested,
the outcome will either be (1) the usual significant OA citation advantage that
most other published studies have reported -- in which case the absence of the
citation advantage in Davis's randomized condition would indeed  be evidence
that the citation advantage was a self-selection artifact -- or (more likely, I
should think) (2) there will be no significant citation advantage in the
self-archiving control condition either, in which case the Davis study will
prove to have been just a non-replication of the usual significant OA citation
advantage (perhaps because of the sample size, the fields, or the fact that most
of the non-OA articles become OA on the journal's website after a year).
Until the requisite self-selected self-archiving control is done, this is just
the sound of one hand clapping.Â
Readers can be trusted to draw their own conclusions as to whether this study,
tirelessly touted as the only methodologically sound one to date, is that -- or
an exercise in advocacy.
Stevan Harnad
