Open Access Archivangelism

Miguel, Sandra, Zaida Chinchilla-Rodriguez & Félix de Moya-Anegón (2011) Open Access and Scopus: A New Approach to Scientific Visibility From the Standpoint of Access. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST)http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/asi.21532

ABSTRACT: The last few years have seen the emergence of several open access (OA) options in scholarly communication, which can be grouped broadly into two areas referred to as gold and green roads. Several recent studies have shown how large the extent of OA is, but there have been few studies showing the impact of OA in the visibility of journals covering all scientific fields and geographical regions.This research presents a series of informative analyses providing a broad overview of the degree of proliferation of OA journals in a data sample of about 17,000 active journals indexed in Scopus. This study shows a new approach to scientific visibility from a systematic combination of four databases: Scopus, the Directory of Open Access Journals, Rights Metadata for Open Archiving (RoMEO)/Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access (SHERPA), and SciMago Journal Rank] and provides an overall, global view of journals according to their formal OA status. The results primarily relate to the number of journals, not to the number of documents published in these journals, and show that in all the disciplinary groups, the presence of green road journals widely surpasses the percentage of gold road publications. The peripheral and emerging regions have greater proportions of gold road journals. These journals belong for the most part to the last quartile. The benefits of OA on visibility of the journals are to be found on the green route, but paradoxically, this advantage is not lent by the OA, per se, but rather by the quality of the articles/journals themselves regardless of their mode of access.

Miguel et al's (2011) article is very timely and useful in its SCOPUS-based quantification of the proportion of journals that are Green, Gold and Gray journals, across fields and countries.

It is also very useful in reviewing and supporting the advantages and primacy of Green OA.

But one of Miguel et al’s conclusions is incorrect:

"The benefits of OA on visibility of the journals are to be found on the green route, but paradoxically, this advantage is not lent by the OA, per se, but rather by the quality of the articles/journals themselves regardless of their mode of access."

The authors show, correctly, that, on average, Green journals (i.e., journals that formally endorse their authors' right to self-archive their articles) have higher impact factors than Gold and non-Green journals, across all fields.

These data are welcome, but they merely confirm what has been known for years now: Most of the top journals are already Green. (Over 60% of journals have been Green for many years now, as SHERPA Romeo has been showing -- and those include most of the top journals in just about every field. The top journals often also tend to have higher impact factors.)

But (alas!) it does not follow from the fact that Green journals have higher impact factors that their authors are actually providing Green OA! Far from it.

Between 5 and 25% of articles are being made Green OA (depending on field) today, and it is only Green OA mandates that significantly increase those percentages.

(Apart from the effect of mandates, the Green OA percentages themselves have been increasing glacially slowly across the years. And Green OA mandates apply to all articles, not just to articles in Green OA journals.)

The reason it became evident to universities and funders that Green OA mandates were necessary was precisely because Green publishers endorsements of their authors’ right to provide Green OA was not enough to induce most authors to provide Green OA.

Miguel et al’s article is helpful in that it supports Green OA (hence, indirectly, it also supports Green OA mandates), but it has unfortunately misinterpreted both the causality and the methodology underlying the studies demonstrating the Green OA citation advantage:

Miguel et al interpret the higher average impact factor of Green journals as the cause underlying the widely reported OA citation impact advantage, suggesting that it is not OA that causes the higher impact, but just the fact that more high-impact journals endorse Green OA.

But most of the studies demonstrating the OA impact advantage are based on comparing on comparing articles within the very same journal (Green OA articles vs. non-OA articles; Gold OA journals are of course omitted in these within-journal comparisons, because all of their articles are OA, so one cannot do compare the impact of OA and non-OA articles).

Hence all the reports of the Green OA impact advantage are based on within-journal effects, not between-journal effects.

Hence it is not relevant for the many reports of the Green OA advantage whether the journals are Green or Gray (Gold journals being eliminated in any case, for methodological reasons). It is also irrelevant what proportions of all journals are Green, Gold or Gray.

I think Miguel et al misinterpretation arises from two sources (not unique to Miguel et al):

(1) A general tendency to conceive of OA as a journal effect rather than an article effect (because of a narrow focus on journals, especially Gold OA journals, as the model for OA).

(2) A systematic ambiguity about the meaning of "Green," depending on whether one is thinking at the journal level or the article level:

(2a) At the journal level, "Green" (unlike "Gold") just means that the journal endorses author-provided Green OA -- it does not mean that the journal (or its authors) actually provides Green OA!

(2b) At the article level, "Green" means that the article has actually been made Green OA.

Apart from that one point, the Miguel et al article contains informative and useful between-journal data on Green and Gold OA, across fields and geographic areas.

It is only one of Miguel et al’s conclusions – that their between-journal data showing that Green OA journals have higher impact factors than both Gold OA and Gray journals somehow explain or invalidate the many within-journal studies demonstrating that Green OA articles within the same journal have higher citation counts than non-OA articles – that does not follow from the evidence (and cannot follow, methodologically or logically).

Björk B-C, Welling P, Laakso M, Majlender P, Hedlund T, et al. (2010) Open Access to the Scientific Journal Literature: Situation 2009. PLOS ONE 5(6): e11273

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

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

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)

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

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

Wagner, B (2010) Open Access Citation Advantage: An Annotated Bibliography Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship 60