Fantasy Economics?

On Sat, 24 Sep 2005, Sally Morris (SM), of the ALPSP, wrote, in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

SM: "Not sure there is any point continuing this but, for what it's worth, increased citations do not self-evidently equate with increased return on research investment. Those who have ears to hear have, I think, already heard. I will post no more on the topic of fantasy economics."

On the topic of fantasy economics (for those with ears to hear), I quote Sally Morris when she is citing usage and citations on the subject of her own speculations about potential revenue loss for publishers:

SM: "Increasingly, librarians are making use of COUNTER-compliant (and therefore comparable) usage statistics to guide their decisions to renew or cancel journals. The Institute of Physics Publishing is therefore concerned to see that article downloads from its site are significantly lower for those journals whose content is substantially replicated in the ArXiV repository than for those which are not." [See reply.]

SM: "Citation statistics and the resultant impact factors are of enormous importance to authors and their institutions; they also influence librarians' renewal/cancellation decisions. Both the Institute of Physics and the London Mathematical Society are therefore troubled to note an increasing tendency for authors to cite only the repository version of an article, without mentioning the journal in which it was later published." [See reply.]

In other words, when usage and citations are being cited as evidence of hypothetical losses to publishers, they are not fantasy economics. But when they are cited as evidence of actual losses to research and researchers, they are fantasy economics.

As it happens, the only fantasy in all of this is Sally Morris's own fantasy "that RCUK's proposed [mandatory self-archiving] policy will inevitably lead to the destruction of journals." As already pointed out at length (for those with ears to hear), Sally adduces zero evidence in support of her fantasy. All objective evidence to date is for peaceful co-existence between journal publishing and self-archiving.

The rest is not fantasy, but facts, among them the worth of a citation to a researcher

Diamond, A., 1986. What is a citation worth? Journal of Human Resources 21, 200-215.

and, still more important, the return, in number of citations, per pound spent on research by RCUK:

Data-based estimate of 760,000 annual citations (on UK's 130,000 annual articles for RCUK's £3.5 billion pounds invested annually = 0.000217 citations per pound [Source: ISI Web of Science]

Data-based estimate of 50%-250% increase of citations for self-archived articles [Source: OST/ISI study]

Data-based estimate that only 15% of articles are being self-archived today[Source: OST/ISI study]

Therefore: 85% x 50% of 760,000 citations = 323,000 citations lost at 0.000217 citations per pound = £1.5 billion pounds worth of citations lost if not self-archived -- and gained if RCUK mandates self-archiving.

It is a real head-shaker that Sally continues to find subjective imagination-based predictions of revenue loss to publishers as a result of self-archiving to be non-fantasy, while she finds objective data-based estimates of researcher revenue loss as well as losses of the return on research investment to researchers, research and the public to be fantasy. But as Sally will safely say no more on the subject...

Stevan Harnad