Open Access Benefits for the Developed and Developing World: The Harvards and the Have-Nots

---

Update Jan 1, 2010: See Gargouri, Y; C Hajjem, V Larivière, Y Gingras, L Carr,T Brody & S Harnad (2010) “Open Access, Whether Self-Selected or Mandated, Increases Citation Impact, Especially for Higher Quality Research”
Update Feb 8, 2010: See also "Open Access: Self-Selected, Mandated & Random; Answers & Questions"

---

---

SUMMARY: Evans & Reimer (2009) (E & R) show that a large portion of the increased citations generated by making articles freely accessible online ("Open Access," OA) comes from Developing-World authors citing OA articles more. It is very likely that a within-US comparison based on the same data would show much the same effect: making articles OA should increase citations from authors at the Have-Not universities (with the smaller journal subscription budgets) more than from Harvard authors. Articles by Developing World (and US Have-Not) authors should also be cited more if they are made OA, but the main beneficiaries of OA will be the best articles, wherever they are published. This raises the question of how many citations – and how much corresponding research uptake, usage, progress and impact – are lost when articles are embargoed for 6-12 months or longer by their publishers against being made OA by their authors.
    (It is important to note that E & R's results are not based on immediate OA but on free access after an embargo of up to a year or more. Theirs is not an estimate of the increase in citation impact that results from immediate Open Access; it is just the increase that results from ending Embargoed Access. In a fast-moving field of science, an access lag of a year can lose a lot of research impact, permanently.)

---

The portion of Evans & Reimer's (2009) study (E & R) is valid is timely and useful, showing that a large portion of the Open Access citation impact advantage comes from providing the developing world with access to the research produced by the developed world. Using a much bigger database, E & R refute (without citing!) a recent flawed study (Frandsen 2009) that reported that there was no such effect (as well as a premature response hailing it as "Open Access: No Benefit for Poor Scientists").

E & R found the following. (Their main finding is number #4):

#1 When articles are made commercially available online their citation impact becomes greater than when they were commercially available only as print-on-paper. (This is unsurprising, since online access means easier and broader access than just print-on-paper access.)

#2 When articles are made freely available online their citation impact becomes greater than when they were not freely available online. (This confirms the widely reported "Open Access" (OA) Advantage.) 

(E & R cite only a few other studies that have previously reported the OA advantage, stating that those were only in a few fields, or within just one journal. This is not correct; there have been many other studies that likewise reported the OA advantage, across nearly as many journals and fields as E & R sampled. E & R also seem to have misunderstood the role of prepublication preprints in those fields (mostly physics) that effectively already have post-publication OA. In those fields, all of the OA advantage comes from the year(s) before publication -- "the Early OA Advantage", which is relevant to the question, raised below, about the harmful effects of access embargoes. And last, E&R cite the few negative studies that have been published -- mostly the deeply flawed studies of Phil Davis -- that found no OA Advantage or even a negative effect (as if making papers freely available reduced their citations!). 

#3 The citation advantage of commercial online access over commercial print-only access is greater than the citation advantage of free access over commercial print plus online access only. (This too is unsurprising, but it is also somewhat misleading, because virtually all journals have commercial online access today: hence the added advantage of free online access is something that occurs over and above mere online (commercial) access -- not as some sort of competitor or alternative to it! The comparison today is toll-based online access vs. free online access.)

(There may be some confusion here between the size of the OA advantage for journals whose contents were made free online after a pospublication embargo period, versus those whose contents were made free online immediately upon publication -- i.e., the OA journals. Commercial online access is of course never embargoed: you get access as soon as its paid for! Previous studies have made within-journal comparisons, field by field, between OA and non-OA articles within the same journal and year. These studies found much bigger OA Advantages because they were comparing like with like and because they were based on a longer time-span: The OA advantage is still small after only a year, because it takes time for citations to build up; this is even truer if the article becomes "OA" only after it has been embargoed for a year or longer!)

#4 The OA Advantage is far bigger in the Developing World (i.e., Developing-World first-authors, when they cite OA compared to non-OA articles). This is the main finding of this article, and this is what refutes the Frandsen study.

What E & R have not yet done (and should!) is to check for the very same effect, but within the Developed World, by comparing the "Harvards vs. the Have-Nots" within, say the US: The ARL has a database showing the size of the journal holdings of most research university libraries in the US. Analogous to their comparison's between Developed and Developing countries, E & R could split the ARL holdings into 10 deciles, as they did with the wealth (GNI) of countries. I am almost certain this will show that a large portion of the OA impact advantage in the US comes from the US's "Have-Nots", compared to its Harvards.

The other question is the converse: The OA advantage for articles authored (rather than cited) by Developing World authors. OA does not just give the Developing World more access to the input it needs (mostly from the Developed World), as E & R showed; but OA also provides more impact for the Developing World's research output, by making it more widely accessible (to both the Developing and Developed world) -- something E & R have not yet looked at either, though they have the data! Because of what Seglen (1992) called the "skewness of science," however, the biggest beneficiaries of OA will of course be the best articles, wherever their authors: 90% of citations go to the top 10% of articles.

Last, there is the crucial question of the effect of access embargoes. It is essential to note that E & R's results are not based on immediate OA but on free access after an embargo of up to a year or more. Theirs is hence not an estimate of the increase in citation impact that results from immediate Open Access; it is just the increase that results from ending Embargoed Access.

It will be important to compare the effect of OA on embargoed versus unembargoed content, and to look at the size of the OA Advantage after an interval of longer than just a year. (Although early access is crucial in some fields, citations are not instantaneous: it may take a few years' work to generate the cumulative citation impact of that early access. But it is also true in some fast-moving fields that the extra momentum lost during a 6-12-month embargo is never really recouped.)

Evans, JA & Reimer, J. (2009) Open Access and Global Participation in Science Science 323(5917) (February 20 2009)

Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Gingras, Y. (2005) Ten-Year Cross-Disciplinary Comparison of the Growth of Open Access and How it Increases Research Citation Impact. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 28(4) pp. 39-47.

Seglen PO (1992) The skewness of science. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 43:628-38

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum