To my knowledge the only serious studies that did not find an OA citation advantage are those conducted by Phil Davies, e.g. http://www.fasebj.org/content/early/2011/03/29/fj.11-183988.full.pdf+htm l . While the selection of articles here was randomized, the selection of journals was not. The "participating journals" tended to be high-impact ones, effectively must-reads for the researchers in the relevant discipline, or even beyond, meaning that practically all those in a position to contribute to the citation count had read the articles. Hence no surprise that there was no meaningfully higher citation rate for articles for which the subscription barrier had been lifted.
For journals that do not fall into the "must-read category", however, there is a marked difference, or at least we - at BioMed Central - observe a marked difference. Typically after 2 or 3 years after a journal converts from TA to OA, i.e. when the impact factor (the one everybody refers to) is based on two years' worth of OA, the IF tends to go up significantly. More anecdotal evidence, yes, but necessarily so as the only strictly non-anecdotal evidence for the OA citation effect is impossible to deliver (working with the same set of articles ....). Over the coming years, when there will be more data on journals whose conversion to OA happened two or more years ago, there will be a raft of such anecdotal evidence. Stefan Busch -----Original Message----- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Andrew A. Adams Sent: 23 March 2012 09:08 To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Tireless Ad Hoc Critiques of OA Study After OA Study: Will Wishful Thinking Ever Cease? > Is it really common sense? You write: "Not only is OA research > downloaded and cited more -- as common sense would expect, as a result > of making it accessible free for all, rather than just for those whose > institutions can afford a subscription". > > First, downloaded more - I can agree. But cited more? This might be an > entire different matter. Usually, as common sense would expect, > researchers will cite. The general public, however, will not cite - > they do not publish research articles. Given that researchers have > "more" access than the general public, due to the access policies of > their institution (paid-for-access, open-access, access-by-delivery), > the citations to articles will not be hampered by > accessibility. Because when it comes to citing an article, a serious > researcher has to read it. And to read it, means: getting access, in > one way or another. Jan, You are putting the cart before the horse here. A decision to cite depends (when the researcher is doing their job properly) on being able to read. Only after an article has been read can the decision to cite or not come into it. For some articles it may be plain from what is toll-fre accesible (the title for pretty much all articles, the abstract for almost all) that an article is important enough to pay whatever price is demanded for access in order to read it and then perhaps to cite it. Given that the cost for an article to which one has no institutional subscription access is usually, in my experience, $30+ for access, then in most cases I would expect researchers to look for alternative articles to read on a topic in which they are looking for relevant material. Those alternative articles will be one to which their institution has a subscription or those for which an OA version is easily available (typically through a search engine though also through web links and through repository browsing and other routes). If one works in a narrow field one is likely to have access to the small number of journals one needs. The broader one's field, and for interdisciplinary researchers this is a particular problem, the less likely it is that one's institution has a relevant subscription. My own approach is certainly this. When looking at an area of research I use various methods of finding apparently-appropriate material, which I then delve deeper into, spiralling in on what is available to me (through subscription or OA) and reading a little bit more at each stage until I get to the point of reading a whole article before perhaps citing it. If I don't have access to the article, it doesn't even get added to my citaton database - what would be the point? I can't cite it if I can't read it and I have never paid for access to an inividual article --- I check for a version I can access, subscription or OA, then email the author if I can to ask for an eprint, but if that fails I abandon the idea of reading that article and move on. There's more published in my area than I could read all of so I read and then cite from what's available to me. Anecdote not evidence, sure, but the large amounts of data on OA increasing citation rates does seem clear - in all significantly sized studies with appropriately chosen sets of articles, those that are available without cost to any and all potential citers are more often cited than those for whom potential citers are limited to those in institutions with subscription access to that article or those persuaded sight unseen to pay for access to that specific article. -- Professor Andrew A Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/ _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
