Open Access Archivangelism

The Research Information Network (RIN) report (Cook et al 2011) basically confirms the immediate practical implication of the Houghton report (Houghton et al 2009): Provide green open access (OA) now (through researchers self-archiving the final refereed drafts of their journal articles in their institutional repositories). That is the solution that is entirely within the hands of the research community, and also the one that confers by far the greatest cost/benefit ratio.

Having reaffirmed this immediate practical course of action, that should have been the end of it. But the RIN report goes on to dip into three secondary issues that are, respectively, short-sighted, premature, and mistaken -- with respect to OA itself, as opposed to whether and when publishing converts from subscription-based to Gold OA:

1. Short-Sighted: It is short-sighted to estimate OA benefits from a national point of view, particularly for the Green OA option, which is already fully within the research community's reach, and is also the option that the RIN report, like the Houghton report, is recommending.

Green OA self-archiving is not a subscription-cost-saving matter. It is a research-access matter. Journal contents have no national boundaries. The immediate benefit to the UK from providing Green OA to UK research output will be the enhanced uptake and impact of UK research globally. This will no doubt encourage the rest of the world to provide Green OA to their research output too. (It is not just the UK that is reading the Houghton and RIN reports.)

As the rest of the world reciprocates with Green OA, the UK also gains in access to research from the rest of the world. Journal subscription cancelations -- if and when they are eventually induced by Green OA -- will not begin happening while only the UK contents of journals have been made Green OA. You can't cancel a journal because its UK-authored contents happen to be available free. Cancelations can only happen once the practice of Green OA self-archiving has become universal.

In fact, the countries that are early adopters of Green OA self-archiving will derive an extra competitive advantage in the uptake and impact of their research output, until the playing field is levelled as other countries catch up by making their own research output Green too.

2. Premature: The RIN report dwells needlessly on how high article processing charges (APCs) for Gold OA could and should be.

Not only are neither conversion to Gold OA publishing nor the APC asking price for Gold OA in the research community's hands, but it is particularly premature to focus on APC asking prices at a time when it is the Green OA option that is the optimal one, and entirely within the research community's reach, whereas only a minority of journals are as yet Gold OA.

The market will take care of APCs if and when their time comes. Right now, OA itself is the priority, and the way to provide immediate OA is for universities and funders to provide Green OA, today, rather than to keep focusing instead on what the APCs for Gold might turn out to be if and when Green OA ever induces a transition to Gold OA.

What is certain is that the money currently being paid out by institutions for publication -- in the form of institutional subscription fees -- is enough to cover the current costs of refereed research publication. That same money could pay for publication via Gold APCs, but if Gold OA comes into its own after universal Green OA has prevailed, Green OA itself, with its distributed network of institutional repositories, will have taken over the full burden of text-generation, archiving and access-provision that is currently being borne by publishers: The print and online edition of the journal will no longer need to be produced, the author's refereed final draft will become the version-of-record, and hence the APCs will shrink to just the cost of peer review.

Today's Gold APC costs and estimates are certainly not based on such a post-Green scenario; hence calculations based on scaling those costs up to all journal articles are premature and irrelevant.

3. Mistaken: Coupled with the needless preoccupation with current and future Gold APCs -- at a time when what is really needed is full speed ahead with Green OA -- the RIN report curiously characterizes Green OA as "unsustainable."

But what is it that's unsustainable? Certainly not OA self-archiving by authors: That can be done for every refereed paper published on the planet for as long as research continues to be conducted. Obviously what RIN means here is that Green OA might eventually make subscription publishing unsustainable. But if and when universal Green OA ever makes subscription publishing unsustainable that means subscriptions will be cancelled by institutions, journals will cut costs, downsize to providing peer review alone and convert to Gold OA APCs; and institutions will pay those much-reduced APCs out of a fraction of their annual windfall subscription cancelation savings.

The RIN report's recommendations on the length of the delay (embargo) before publishers make their own versions-of-record OA -- like its premature preoccupation with the price of Gold APCs and its needless preoccupation with sustaining publishers' current revenue streams -- are irrelevant to Green OA.

Green OA is based on the author's refereed final draft, not the publisher's version of record. Publisher embargoes on OA to the version of record are more a matter of the sustainability of subscription publishing, hence whether it continues to co-exist in parallel with Green OA or converts to Gold OA.

---

Cook J, Hulls D, Jones D & Ware M (2011) Heading for the Open Road: costs and benefits of transitions in scholarly communications. Research Information Network (RIN)

Harnad, S. (2010a) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus 28 (1). pp. 55-59.

Harnad, S. (2010b) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).

Houghton, J.W., Rasmussen, B., Sheehan, P.J., Oppenheim, C., Morris, A., Creaser, C., Greenwood, H., Summers, M. and Gourlay, A. (2009). Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the Costs and Benefits, London and Bristol: The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)

Re: Chronicle of Higher Education

It is true that downloads of research findings are important. They are being measured, and the evidence of the open-access download advantage is growing. See:

S. Hitchcock (2011) "The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies"

A. Swan (2010) "The Open Access citation advantage: Studies and results to date"

B. Wagner (2010) "Open Access Citation Advantage: An Annotated Bibliography"

But the reason it is the open-access citation advantage that is especially important is that refereed research is conducted and published so it can be accessed, used, applied and built upon in further research: Research is done by researchers, for uptake by researchers, for the benefit of the public that funds the research. Both research progress and researchers' careers and funding depend on research uptake and impact.

The greatest growth potential for open access today is through open access self-archiving mandates adopted by the universal providers of research: the researchers' universities, institutions and funders (e.g., Harvard and MIT) . See the ROARMAP registry of open-access mandates.

Universities adopt open access mandates in order to maximize their research impact. The large body of evidence, in field after field, that open access increases citation impact, helps motivate universities to mandate open access self-archiving of their research output, to make it accessible to all its potential users -- rather than just those whose universities can afford subscription access -- so that all can apply, build upon and cite it. (Universities can only afford subscription access to a fraction of research journals.)

The Davis study lacks the statistical power to show what it purports to show, which is that the open access citation advantage is not causal, but merely an artifact of authors self-selectively self-archiving their better (hence more citable) papers. Davis's sample size was smaller than many of the studies reporting the open access citation advantage. Davis found no citation advantage for randomized open access. But that does not demonstrate that open access is a self-selection artifact -- in that study or any other study -- because Davis did not replicate the widely reported self-archiving advantage either, and that advantage is often based on far larger samples. So the Davis study is merely a small non-replication of a widely reported outcome. (There are a few other non-replications; but most of the studies to date replicate the citation advantage, especially those based on bigger samples.)

Davis says he does not see why the inferences he attempts to make from his results -- that the reported open access citation advantage is an artifact, eliminated by randomization, that there is hence no citation advantage, which implies that there is no research access problem for researchers, and that researchers should just content themselves with the open access download advantage among lay users and forget about any citation advantage -- are not welcomed by researchers.

These inferences are not welcomed because they are based on flawed methodology and insufficient statistical power and yet they are being widely touted -- particularly by the publishing industry lobby (see the spin FASEB is already trying to put on the Davis study: "Paid access to journal articles not a significant barrier for scientists"!) -- as being the sole methodologically sound test of the open access citation advantage! Ignore the many positive studies. They are all methodologically flawed. The definitive finding, from the sole methodologically sound study, is null. So there's no access problem, researchers have all the access they need -- and hence there's no need to mandate open access self-archiving.

No, this string of inferences is not a "blow to open access" -- but it would be if it were taken seriously.

What would be useful and opportune at this point would be meta-analysis.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
EnablingOpenScholarship

Re: Nature: The Great Beyond

Suppose many studies report that cancer incidence is correlated with smoking and you want to demonstrate in a methodologically sounder way that this correlation is not caused by smoking itself, but just an artifact of the fact that the same people who self-select to smoke are also the ones who are more prone to cancer. So you test a small sample of people randomly assigned to smoke or not, and you find no difference in their cancer rates. How can you know that your sample was big enough to detect the repeatedly reported correlation at all unless you test whether it's big enough to show that cancer incidence is significantly higher for self-selected smoking than for randomized smoking?

Many studies have reported a statistically significant increase in citations for articles whose authors make them OA by self-archiving them. To show that this citation advantage is not caused by OA but just a self-selection artifact (because authors selectively self-archive their better, more citeable papers), you first have to replicate the advantage itself, for the self-archived OA articles in your sample, and then show that that advantage is absent for the articles made OA at random. But Davis showed only that the citation advantage was absent altogether in his sample. The most likely reason for that is that the sample was much too small (36 journals, 712 articles randomly OA, 65 self-archived OA, 2533 non-OA).

In a recent study (Gargouri et al 2010) we controlled for self-selection using mandated (obligatory) OA rather than random OA. The far larger sample (1984 journals, 3055 articles mandatorily OA, 3664 self-archived OA, 20,982 non-OA) revealed a statistically significant citation advantage of about the same size for both self-selected and mandated OA.

If and when Davis's requisite self-selected self-archiving control is ever tested, the outcome will either be (1) the usual significant OA citation advantage in the self-archiving control condition 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 had been a self-selection artifact that was then successfully eliminated by the randomization -- or (more likely, I should think) (2) no significant citation advantage will be found in the self-archiving control condition either, in which case the Davis study will prove to have been just one non-replication of the usual significant OA citation advantage (perhaps because of Davis's small sample size, the fields, or the fact that most of the non-OA articles become OA on the journal's website after a year). (There have been a few other non-replications; but most studies replicate the OA citation advantage, especially the ones based on larger samples.)

Until that requisite self-selected self-archiving control is done, this is just the sound of one hand clapping.

Readers can be trusted to draw their own conclusions as to whether Davis's study, tirelessly touted as the only methodologically sound one to date, is that -- or an exercise in advocacy. 

Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research (2010) PLOS ONE 5 (10) (authors: Gargouri, Y., Hajjem, C., Lariviere, V., Gingras, Y., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S.)