Open Access Archivangelism

In the world of journal articles, each article is both a "citing" item and a "cited" item. The list of references a given article cites provides that article's outgoing citations. And all the other articles in whose reference lists that article is cited provide that article's incoming citations.

Formerly, with Google Scholar (first launched in November 2004) (1) you could do a google-like boolean (and, or, not, etc.) word search, which ranked the articles that it retrieved by how highly cited they were. Then, for any individual citing article in that ranked list of citing articles, (2) you could go on to retrieve all the articles citing that individual cited article, again ranked by how highly cited they were. But you could not go on to do a boolean word search within just that set of citing articles; as of July 1 you can. (Thanks to Joseph Esposito for pointing this out on liblicense.)

Of course, Google Scholar is a potential scientometric killer-app that is just waiting to design and display powers far, far greater and richer than even these. Only two things are holding it back: (a) the sparse Open Access content of the web to date (only about 20% of articles published annually) and (b) the sleepiness of Google, in not yet realizing what a potentially rich scientometric resource and tool they have in their hands (or, rather, their harvested full-text archives).

Citebase gives a foretaste of some more of the latent power of an Open Access impact and influence engine (so does citeseerx), but even that is pale in comparison with what is still to come -- if only Green OA self-archiving mandates by the world's universities, the providers of all the missing content, hurry up and get adopted so that they can be implemented, and then all the target content for these impending marvels (not just 20% of it) can begin being reliably provided at long last.

(Elsevier's SCOPUS and Thomson-Reuters' Web of Knowledge are of course likewise standing by, ready to upgrade their services so as to point also to the OA versions of the content they index -- if only we hurry up and make it OA!)

Harnad, S. (2001) Proposed collaboration: google + open citation linking. OAI-General. June 2001.

Harnad, S. (2001) Research access, impact and assessment. Times Higher Education Supplement 1487: p. 16.

Brody, T., Kampa, S., Harnad, S., Carr, L. and Hitchcock, S. (2003) Digitometric Services for Open Archives Environments. In Proceedings of European Conference on Digital Libraries 2003, pp. 207-220, Trondheim, Norway.

Hitchcock, Steve; Woukeu, Arouna; Brody, Tim; Carr, Les; Hall, Wendy & Harnad, Stevan. (2003) Evaluating Citebase, an open access Web-based citation-ranked search and impact discovery service. ECS Technical Report, University of Southampton.

Harnad, Stevan (2003) Maximizing Research Impact by Maximizing Online Access. In: Law, Derek & Judith Andrews, Eds. Digital Libraries: Policy Planning and Practice. Ashgate Publishing 2003.

Harnad, S. (2006) Online, Continuous, Metrics-Based Research Assessment. ECS Technical Report, University of Southampton.

Brody, T., Carr, L., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) Time to Convert to Metrics. Research Fortnight pp. 17-18.

Brody, T., Carr, L., Gingras, Y., Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) Incentivizing the Open Access Research Web: Publication-Archiving, Data-Archiving and Scientometrics. CTWatch Quarterly 3(3).

Harnad, S. (2008) Validating Research Performance Metrics Against Peer Rankings. Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics 8 (11) [The Use And Misuse Of Bibliometric Indices In Evaluating Scholarly Performance]

Harnad, S., Carr, L. and Gingras, Y. (2008) Maximizing Research Progress Through Open Access Mandates and Metrics. Liinc em Revista 4(2).

Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos.

Harnad, S. (2009) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. Scientometrics 79 (1)