Open Access Archivangelism

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Update Jan 1, 2010: See Gargouri, Y; C Hajjem, V Larivière, Y Gingras, L Carr,T Brody & S Harnad (2010) “Open Access, Whether Self-Selected or Mandated, Increases Citation Impact, Especially for Higher Quality Research”
Update Feb 8, 2010: See also "Open Access: Self-Selected, Mandated & Random; Answers & Questions"

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SUMMARY: Early Access means starting the Open Access advantage (enhanced research usage and citations) earlier. This does not just mean phase-advancing the lifetime citation expectancy of an article (i.e., same total number of citations, but just starting earlier). Paper uploads generate downloads, which then generate usage and citations, which generate more downloads, which generate more usage and citations, etc. This interactive cycle can increase not just the onset of the citation curve, but its total area. And not just horizontally, but vertically: If it is obvious that it is not irrelevant to the usage and impact of a finding whether it is published two months before it is needed for use in a related study by another researcher, or ten years after, then it should not take much imagination (just a change in time-scale) to see how Early Access does not just mean earlier usage and citations but more usage and citations, because of the widening self-potentiating uptake cycle of research. And this of course applies to both preprints and postprints: An article that is published at time T but only made OA at time T + 12 months (embargo) stands to lose a good deal of its potential uptake and impact (especially in fast-moving fields) -- some of it lost forever; and meanwhile research loses widening cycles of potential progress. It is only to those who are straining to persuade us to resign ourselves passively to publisher embargoes -- as if they made no difference at all to our research usage, uptake, impact, and progress -- that these banal truths will be anything less than obvious.

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Matt Hodgkinson [MH] of BioMed Central has raised some important points about the Early Access Advantage in the SPARC Open Access Forum. I add a few supporting comments here:

MH: "in a famine it is no good if food is in the shops, but the prices are too high for the starving to afford it."

Spot on.

MH: "I don't want to pay $25-50 to read an article I'm not sure is worth the money... Indeed, if it is not immediately available online then even a visit to the library... I would avoid if possible..."

And it's virtually certain that huge quantities of potential usage and impact are being lost daily, worldwide, for this very reason. Indeed, a component in the OA usage/impact advantage is surely a competitive advantage (CA): The articles that are not yet freely accessible online lose out to the ones that are. CA is not the only component in the OA advantage, nor necessarily the biggest one. And CA (along with the self-selection Quality Bias QB -- the greater tendency for the better articles/authors to be among the self-archived/self-archiving ones) will of course vanish completely once everything is OA. But for now, CA is an extra -- and potentially substantial -- competitive edge that the OA articles have over the non-OA ones while much of research is still non-OA.

MH: "I don't quite understand something about [Early Access] - is it solely an effect of preprints/self-archiving?"

No, it definitely applies to all OA papers, whether preprint or postprint, whether published in a non-OA journal and self-archived or published in an OA journal. Early Access means having the OA advantage earlier. The earliest possible moment for the refereed draft is the moment when the final version is accepted for publication; that is the latest time at which it should be made OA. (Until then there may still be changes and corrections from the refereeing; and in many fields cautious users will not want to risk relying on the unrefereed preprint. So preprint self-archiving must be discretionary; it is postprint self-archiving that must be mandatory.)

I strongly doubt the claim that Early Access just means phase-advancing the lifetime citation expectancy of an article -- i.e., the claim that the total number of citations remains the same: they just start happening earlier. I think it might look like that for fields that are virtually 100% OA already, like astrophysics: There it has been reported that the citation curves look the same for articles that are and are not self-archived as preprints, the only difference being that for the preprinted ones the citation curve starts earlier.

What this leaves out is when the curve ends! Two wave-fronts may look the same, apart from a phase difference, but then there's the question of the long-term total area under the wave. The way paper uploads generate downloads -- which then generate usage and citations, which then generate more downloads, which generate more usage and citations, etc. -- also suggests that this interactive cycle can increase not just the earliness of the onset time of citations but the total area (citations) under the curve. And not just horizontally, but vertically too: Other research is going on in parallel. If it is obvious that it is not irrelevant to the usage and impact of a finding whether it is published two months before it is needed for use in a related study by another researcher, or ten years after, then it should not take much imagination (just a change in time-scale) to see how Early Access does not just mean earlier usage and citations but more usage and citations, because of the widening self-potentiating cycle of research.

And this of course applies to both preprints and postprints: An article that is published at time T but only made OA at time T + 12 months (embargo) stands to lose a good deal of its potential impact (especially in fast-moving fields) -- some of it lost forever; and meanwhile research loses widening cycles of potential progress.

MH: "[Early Access] appears to be a somewhat complicated way of saying that if an article is available earlier, it can be read and cited sooner."

Which is in turn a somewhat complicated way of saying that if an article is accessible, it can be read and cited, and the more it is accessible -- whether more widely or earlier -- the more it can be read and cited. In other words, OA applies to both time and space: The sooner and the more widely findings are accessible, the sooner and the more widely they can be taken up, applied, built upon, used, and cited. Early Access benefits are merely a particular case of OA benefits.

It is only to those who are straining to persuade us to resign ourselves passively to publisher embargoes -- as if they made no difference at all to our research usage, uptake, impact, and progress -- that these banal truths will be anything less than obvious.

MH: "Is the rapid dissemination of science not a good thing, and should this result not encourage all authors to deposit preprints and postprints?"

Of course it is, and should. The only ones who would have us think otherwise are those who feel their revenues might be put at risk by such deposits (which, eventually, they indeed might). But instead of just coming out and saying that -- "Please don't self-archive, because it might make me lose some subscription revenue" -- publishers try to persuade researchers not to self-archive because it wouldn't make any difference to research. (And at the same time they lobby governments not to mandate OA self-archiving, as if the only thing at issue were publishers' potential revenue losses, rather than research's actual impact losses -- for all the world as if publicly funded research were being conducted in the service of the publishing industry, rather than vice versa.)

This strategy calls to mind nothing less than the efforts of polluting industries to persuade the public that the pollution makes no difference to their climate, or the efforts of tobacco companies to persuade smokers that the smoking will make no difference to their health. The strategy is essentially the same as that of OJ Simpson's Dream Team: Simply take every piece of empirical evidence (that is unfavourable to your client), find some ad hoc flaw in it, no matter how trivial, and crank and spin that so as to sow a seed of doubt in every instance. Such a strategy worked for the tobacco industry until the evidence became overwhelming. But meanwhile, smokers needlessly lost years of health, just as research is now needlessly losing years of impact and progress.

I have for years been restraining myself from making these analogies with the tobacco and pollution industries, because it seemed too shrill: impact, after all, is not as vital as health. Maybe, maybe not (the two are not unconnected!). But what is making me less inclined to continue to be so restrained and charitable is the relentless (and mostly successful) lobbying by the publishing industry against Green OA mandates. The motivation is identical: Do and say whatever it takes to protect your revenue streams, whether it's at the cost of research impact or health impact.

The gloves are now off...

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

PS I don't particularly mean Sally Morris, of course, who wrote in SPARC Open Access Forum:

"[Early Access] is to do with the article being available sooner, not more widely (that would be the 'OA advantage', if any). Articles in OA journals are available no sooner than those in conventional journals - i.e. on publication."

but the publishing industry's pit-bulls, who have so far successfully lobbied the DTI in the UK, NIH in the US, the Bundesrat in Germany, the EC in Brussels and the Industry and Finance ministries in Canada. OA has no lobby, but it has a far, far bigger constituency, which needs merely to be rallied to show its collective strength: researchers, research institutions, research funders, the vast R&D industry, and the public whose taxes support the research.