The Evans & Reimer OA Impact Study: A Welter of Misunderstandings

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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"

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Basken, Paul (2009) Fee-Based Journals Get Better Results, Study in Fee-Based Journal Reports. Chronicle of Higher Education February 23, 2009

(Re: Paul Basken) No, the Evans & Reimer (E & R) study in Science does not show that

"researchers may find a wider audience if they make their findings available through a fee-based Web site rather than make their work freely available on the Internet."

This is complete nonsense, since the "fee-based Web site" is immediately and fully accessible -- to all those who can and do pay for access in any case. (It is simply the online version of the journal; for immediate permanent access to it, an individual or institution pays a subscription or license fee.) The free version is extra: a supplement to that fee-based online version, not an alternative to it: it is provided for those would-be users who cannot afford the access-fee. In E & R's study, the free access is provided -- after an access-embargo of up to a year or more -- by the journal itself. In studies by others, the free access is provided by the author, depositing the final refereed draft of the article on his own website, free for all (usually immediately, with no prior embargo). E & R did not examine the latter form of free online access at all. (Paul Basken has confused (1) the size of the benefits of fee-based online access over fee-based print-access alone with (2) the size of the benefits of free online access over fee-based online-access alone. The fault is partly E & R's for describing their findings in such an equivocal way.)

(Re: Phil Davis) No, E & R do not show that

"the effect of OA on citations may be much smaller than originally reported."

E & R show that the effect of free access on citations after an access-embargo (fee-based access only) of up to a year or longer is much smaller than the effect of the more immediate OA that has been widely reported.

(Re: Phil Davis) No, E & R do not show that

"the vast majority of freely-accessible scientific articles are not published in OA journals, but are made freely available by non-profit scientific societies using a subscription model."

E & R did not even look at the vast majority of current freely-accessible articles (per year), which are the ones self-archived by their authors. E & R looked only at journals that make their entire contents free after an access-embargo of up to a year or more. (Cumulative back-files will of course outnumber any current year, but what current research needs, especially in fast-moving fields, is immediate access to current, ongoing research, not just legacy research.)

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

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum