OA Impact Advantage

Laakso & Björk (2013) compare the citation impact of immediate Gold OA with delayed Gold and toll-access. They find that delayed-Gold journals average twice as many citations per article as toll-access journals and three times as many as immediate-Gold journals.

This is based on comparisons between different journals. But journals differ in both subject matter and quality -- and one of the ways to try to equate them to make them comparable for quality is to equate them for impact.

So if journals are not equated for subject matter and quality, one is comparing apples and oranges. But if immediate Gold OA, delayed-Gold and toll-access journals are equated for impact, one can't compare impact for delayed vs. immediate Gold -- in fact one can't compare the journals for citation impact at al!!

A feasible way to compare immediate-OA with delayed-access and toll-access is via Green OA based on within-journal comparisons instead of between-journal comparisons, by comparing articles published within the same journal and year that are and are not made Green OA. To do this one needs both the date of publication and the date the article was made Green OA.

It is impossible to get the OA date for webwide deposits in general, but for repository deposits it is possible.

We do have some very preliminary and partial data from the University of Minho repository, but the sample is still too small to do within-journal comparisons. Immediate Green OA articles do have more citations on average than Delayed Access articles (see Figures 2c and 3c) despite the availability of the automated "Almost-OA" Button during the delay period, but these citation counts are just absolute ones, rather than relative to within-journal matched toll-access controls. Hence these are likewise still comparisons between apples and oranges. (Note also that the large number of undeposited articles is likewise unmatched, and not based on their respective within-journal matched toll-access controls.)

The sample will grow as the number of Green OA mandates and repository deposits worldwide grows. The vast unused potential for immediate Green-OA and Almost-OA has long been known and noted -- most recently by Laakso (2014).

Gargouri, Yassine, Larivière, Vincent & Harnad, Stevan (2013) Ten-year Analysis of University of Minho Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate (in E Rodrigues, Ed. title to come)

Laakso, M., & Björk, B. C. (2013). Delayed open access: An overlooked high-impact category of openly available scientific literature. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.

Laakso, M (2014) Green open access policies of scholarly journal publishers: a study of what, when, and where self-archiving is allowed. Scientometrics (in press)

Open Access ≠ Open Access Journals. In AAAS's ScienceInsider, Jocelyn Kaiser reports the results of yet another survey showing that researchers want Open Access but do not provide it.

But if you ask the wrong questions, you get the wrong answers.

Open Access (OA) means free online access to peer-reviewed journal articles.

OA provides for researchers the advantage of maximizing the access, uptake, usage, applications, progress and impact of their research findings by making them accessible to all potential users, not just subscribers. Most researchers already know this.

There are two ways for researchers to provide OA:

--- (1) either researchers publish in an OA journal, which makes its article free for all online ("Gold OA");

--- (2) or researchers publish in their journal of choice but also self-archive their final peer-reviewed draft in their institutional OA repository, which makes it free for all online ("Green OA").

Gold OA has all the disadvantages mentioned and not mentioned by Kaiser: (i) not the author's established journal of choice; (iii) may have low or no peer-review standards (iii) may cost the author money to publish, out of scarce research funds.

That explains why most authors want OA but few provide Gold OA (as this latest Science survey yet again found).

About twice as many authors provide Green OA as Gold OA, but that's still very few: So what are the reasons authors don't provide Green OA?

Authors don't provide Green OA because they (i) fear it might be illegal; (ii) fear it might jeopardize publishing in their journal of choice; (iii) fear it might jeopardize peer-reviewed publishing itself.

The difference between the reasons why authors don't provide Gold OA and the reasons they don't provide Green OA is that the former are valid reasons and the latter are not.

But the solution is already being implemented worldwide, although Kaiser does not mention it:

Research funders and research institutions worldwide are mandating (requiring) Green OA.

Over 60% of journals already formally endorse immediate, unembargoed Green OA.

For the remaining 40% of articles, published in journals that embargo Green OA for 6, 12, 24 months or longer, they can be deposited as Closed Access (CA) instead of OA duriing the embargo: institutional repositories have a request-a-copy Button that allows users to request and authors to provide an email copy of any CA deposit with one click each ("Almost-OA").

So Green OA mandates can provide at least 60% immediate OA plus 40% Almost-OA. (This unused potential for immediate Green-OA and Almost-OA has long been known and noted -- most recently by Laakso (2014)).

And if Green OA mandates eventually make subscriptions unsustainable -- because Green OA from OA institutional repositories makes it possible for institutions to cancel their subscriptions -- then journals will cut costs (leaving all access-provision and archiving to the Green OA repositories), downsize and convert to Gold OA, providing peer review at a fair, affordable, sustainable price, paid for out of the institutions' subscription cancellation savings (not authors' research funds).

So mandatory Green OA is (i) legal, (ii) does not jeopardize authors' publishing in their journal of choice and (iii) does not jeopardize publishing or peer review:

Mandating Green OA merely provides Green OA (and Almost-OA) until journals convert to affordable Gold OA so that (i) authors can continue to publish in their established journal of choice; (ii) need not risk low or no peer-review standards (iii) need not pay to publish out of scarce research funds.

It would have been more complicated for the Science survey to explain the Green/Gold contingencies before asking the questions, but it would have been more informative than asking, as this survey did, "What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping?"

The outcome would have been that the vast majority of researchers will willingly comply with a Green OA mandate, exactly as had already been found by Swan & Brown's classic international JISC survey in 2005: