Saturday, April 6. 2013
Paid-Gold OA, Free-Gold OA & Journal Quality Standards
Peter Suber has pointed out that "About 50% of articles published in peer-reviewed OA journals are published in fee-based journals" (as reported by Laakso & Bjork 2012).Laakso & Bjork also report that "[12% of] articles published during 2011 and indexed in the most comprehensive article-level index of scholarly articles (Scopus) are available OA through journal publishers... immediately...".
That's 12% immediate Gold-OA for the (already selective) SCOPUS sample. The percentage is still smaller for the more selective Thomson-Reuters/ISI sample.
I think it cannot be left out of the reckoning about paid-Gold OA vs. free-Gold OA that:
(#1) most articles are not published as Gold OA at all today (neither paid-Gold nor free-Gold)#2 and #3 are hypotheses, but I think they can be tested objectively.
(#2) the articles of the quality that users need and want most are much less likely to be published as Gold OA (whether paid-Gold or free-Gold) today, and, most important,
(#3) the Gold OA articles of the quality that users need and want most today are less likely to be the free-Gold ones than the paid-Gold ones (even though the junk journals on Jeffrey Beall's "predatory" Gold OA journal list are all paid-Gold).
A test for #2 would be to compare the download and citation counts (not the journal impact factors) for Gold OA (including hybrid Gold) articles vs non-Gold subscription journal articles (excluding the ones that have been made Green OA) within the same subject (and language!) area.
A test for #3 would be to compare the download and citation counts (not the journal impact factors) for paid-Gold (including hybrid Gold) vs free-gold articles within the same subject (and language!) area.
I mention this because I think just comparing the number of paid-Gold vs. free-Gold journals without taking quality into account could be misleading.
Trackbacks
Trackback specific URI for this entry
No Trackbacks
Comments
Display comments as
(Linear | Threaded)
Björn Brembs wrote: "I'd be very hesitant to equate downloads/citations with quality. Large-scale studies over the last ten, twenty years have shown no, or, in some cases even an inverse relationship with other quality measures and citation-based journal ranks:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.3748
In no case was there a positive relationship. In other words, citations don't seem to be indicative of quality, only of 'perceived importance' which seems to be, if at all, an inverse predictor of quality.
"The most consequential conclusion from this data is to assume that there is no quality relationship between journals and their articles, until there is solid data indicating such a relationship."
REPLY: The review you cite concerns journal rank (journal impact factor, journal average citation count). I was referring to individual article (or author) download and citation counts.
It would be very surprising if the articles researchers choose to download, cite and use had no relation to their importance or quality.
I would agree, though, with a call to validate download and citation counts against other measures of quality and importance.
Harnad, S. (2008) Validating Research Performance Metrics Against Peer Rankings. Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics 8 (11) doi:10.3354/esep00088 The Use And Misuse Of Bibliometric Indices In Evaluating Scholarly Performance http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/15619/
Harnad, S. (2009) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. Scientometrics 79 (1) Also in Proceedings of 11th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics 11(1), pp. 27-33, Madrid, Spain. Torres-Salinas, D. and Moed, H. F., Eds. (2007) http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/17142/
http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.3748
In no case was there a positive relationship. In other words, citations don't seem to be indicative of quality, only of 'perceived importance' which seems to be, if at all, an inverse predictor of quality.
"The most consequential conclusion from this data is to assume that there is no quality relationship between journals and their articles, until there is solid data indicating such a relationship."
REPLY: The review you cite concerns journal rank (journal impact factor, journal average citation count). I was referring to individual article (or author) download and citation counts.
It would be very surprising if the articles researchers choose to download, cite and use had no relation to their importance or quality.
I would agree, though, with a call to validate download and citation counts against other measures of quality and importance.
Harnad, S. (2008) Validating Research Performance Metrics Against Peer Rankings. Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics 8 (11) doi:10.3354/esep00088 The Use And Misuse Of Bibliometric Indices In Evaluating Scholarly Performance http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/15619/
Harnad, S. (2009) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. Scientometrics 79 (1) Also in Proceedings of 11th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics 11(1), pp. 27-33, Madrid, Spain. Torres-Salinas, D. and Moed, H. F., Eds. (2007) http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/17142/
EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS)
Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA)
Quicksearch
Syndicate This Blog
Materials You Are Invited To Use To Promote OA Self-Archiving:
Videos:
audio WOS
Wizards of OA -
audio U Indiana
Scientometrics -
The American Scientist Open Access Forum has been chronicling and often directing the course of progress in providing Open Access to Universities' Peer-Reviewed Research Articles since its inception in the US in 1998 by the American Scientist, published by the Sigma Xi Society.
The American Scientist Open Access Forum has been chronicling and often directing the course of progress in providing Open Access to Universities' Peer-Reviewed Research Articles since its inception in the US in 1998 by the American Scientist, published by the Sigma Xi Society.
The Forum is largely for policy-makers at universities, research institutions and research funding agencies worldwide who are interested in institutional Open Acess Provision policy. (It is not a general discussion group for serials, pricing or publishing issues: it is specifically focussed on institutional Open Acess policy.)
You can sign on to the Forum here.
Archives
Calendar
|
May '21 | |||||
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
| 1 | 2 | |||||
| 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
| 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 |
| 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 |
| 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
| 31 | ||||||
Categories
Blog Administration
Statistics
Last entry: 2018-09-14 13:27
1129 entries written
238 comments have been made