Thursday, June 9. 2011Richard Poynder Interviews U Liege Rector Bernard Rentier About Green OA Mandates
Why is U Liege's ORBi Repository #1 out of 1414 institutional repositories indexed by ROAR (in the medium activity range: 10-100 deposits daily)?
Richard Poynder interviews U Liege's Rector, Bernard Rentier, to find out why. (Hint: Immediate Deposit [ID/OA] Mandate, with repository deposit also serving as the mechanism for submitting publications for researchers' annual performance review: See ROARMAP.) Professor Rentier is also founder and chairman of the board of Enabling Open Scholarship (EOS), an organisation helping universities and research institutions worldwide develop an OA policy. The OA Interviews: Bernard Rentier, Rector of the University of Liège Saturday, June 4. 2011IOP: Angels or...?
There is a blatant contradiction between two statements of Institute of Physics (IOP) Publishers policy on Green OA self-archiving of the author's refereed final draft. It is not clear whether IOP is on the side of the angels or...:
A. There is this one, according to which IOP is and remains on the side of the angels: ...Exercise of the rights in 3.3 additionally must not use the final published IOP format but the Named Author’s own format (which may include amendments made following peer review).G. Then there is this one (amidst a lot of puffery about Gold OA publication), according to which "IOPScience" is on the other side: What is IOP's policy on self-archiving?Question for the Managing Director of IOP Publishing (Steven Hall): Which is it? Angels or...? And if this is a difference between IOP policy and "IOPScience" policy, it would be very helpful to have a clear explanation of which is which, and which journals are involved in each.
I may be mistaken, but I think IOP may be conflating IOP journal embargo policies and IOP repository embargo policies. According to IOP's current online documentation (not only the current IOP general copyright form, but also the current IOP copyright FAQs - see below), IOP authors may immediately deposit the author's final draft in their institutional repository (or a central repository, like Arxiv). No embargo. No fee: There is no mention at all made of exceptions -- by journal. However, there is a mention of an exception by repository: For some (unspecified) reason, IOP authors may not deposit their final drafts in NIH's PubMed Central:IOP | For Authors Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)12. I have submitted my article to an IOP journal. Can I also submit it to 13. What is IOP’s policy with regard to UK PubMed Central and NIH?Now this exception (though a rather arbitrary one) would still leave IOP on the side of the angels. Could someone from IOP please confirm whether this continues to be the only exception (apart from rival publishers' 3rd-party repositories, of course)? That would serve to correct the apparent contradiction with the following June 2011 update: Publishing a gold OA journal (New Journal of Physics, NJP), as IOP does, is admirable, but if I am not mistaken, IOP publishes 29 journals -- plus 38 more in partnership with other learned societies. I will assume (conservatively) that the IOP FAQ speaks only for the 29 journals published by IOP (although IOP's one pure open access journal, NJP, is one of the partnered journals). Open access means open access to all the articles in all the 29 IOP journal, not just the articles in NJP.IOP Publishing open access policyWhat is IOP's policy on self-archiving? Not that being "on the side of the angels" means that all 29 IOP journals need to be gold OA journals: it just means that all 29 IOP journals endorse author self-archiving of the final draft, immediately upon acceptance for publication (green OA). That is what the current IOP copyright agreement states clearly in clause 3.3.2 and 3.3.3 and the current IOP copyright FAQ states clearly in clause 12 and 17. Regarding the sustainability of the subscription model, Alma Swan reported in 2005 that IOP and APS, the publishers with the longest experience with green OA self archiving, dating all the way back to 1991, and having long ago reached 100% in several fields, responded as follows: "In a separate exercise we asked the American Physical Society (APS) and the Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd (IOPP) what their experiences have been over the 14 years that arXiv has been in existence. How many subscriptions have been lost as a result of arXiv? Both societies said they could not identify any losses of subscriptions for this reason and that they do not view arXiv as a threat to their business (rather the opposite --in fact the APS helped establish an arXiv mirror site at the Brookhaven National Laboratory)."
Now it would look unprepossessing in the extreme, would it not, if a publisher were to air the following policy today: "We are progressive publishers, not trying to oppose OA: You may make your final draft green OA by depositing it in your institutional repository -- except if you are mandated to do so (by your funder or institution), and especially if your funder or institution is foolish enough to offer to pay for gold OA. In that case, you may only deposit it if you pay; or must wait 12 or 24 months if you don't -- even if you've already been providing immediate green OA for free for 'lo these 20 past years already..." Wednesday, June 1. 2011ROARMAP's Green Open Access Mandates Pass 200 Mark
With the mandates of Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena and Universidade Federal do Rio Grande, ROARMAP has now passed the 200 mark. Many more are on the way. Please do register yours, if it is not yet registered.
Institutional Mandates (122) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum EnablingOpenScholarship Tuesday, May 31. 2011Gold Dust Still Obscuring the Clear Green Road To Open Access
The primary target of the worldwide Open Access (OA) initiative is the 2.5 million articles published every year in the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed research journals across all scholarly and scientific fields. Without exception, every one of those yearly articles is an author give-away that is written, not for royalty income, but solely to be used, applied and built upon by other researchers.
The optimal and inevitable solution for this give-away research is that it should be made freely accessible to all its would-be users online and not only to those whose institutions can afford subscription access to the journal in which it happens to be published. Yet this optimal and inevitable solution, already fully within the reach of the global research community for at least two decades now, has been taking a remarkably long time to be grasped because of a number of widespread and tenacious misconceptions. The solution is for the world's universities and research funders to (1) extend their existing "publish or perish" mandates so as to (2) require their employees and fundees to maximize the usage and impact of the research that they are employed and funded to conduct and publish by (3) self-archiving their final drafts in their OA Institutional Repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication in order to (4) make their findings freely accessible to all their potential users webwide. Universities need to make deposit in their institutional repository the official mechanism for submitting research for performance review and research assessment; universities can also monitor and ensure compliance with funder mandates through deposit in their institutional repository. OA metrics can then be used to measure and reward research progress and impact; and multiple layers of links, tags, commentary and discussion can be built upon and integrated with the primary research. Plans by universities and research funders to pay the costs of publishing in OA journals ("Gold OA") are premature. Funds are short; about 80% of journals (including virtually all the top journals) are still subscription-based, tying up the potential funds to pay for Gold OA; the asking price for Gold OA is still high; and there is concern that paying to publish may inflate acceptance rates and lower quality standards. What is needed first is for all universities and funders to mandate OA self-archiving (of authors' final peer-reviewed drafts, immediately upon acceptance for publication) ("Green OA"). That will provide immediate OA. Thereafter, if and when universal Green OA should go on to make subscriptions unsustainable (because users are satisfied with just the Green OA versions, and so their institutions cancel their journal subscriptions) that will in turn induce journals to cut costs (by dropping the print edition, online edition, access-provision, and archiving), downsize to just providing the service of peer review, and convert to the Gold OA cost-recovery model. Meanwhile, the subscription cancellations will have released the institutional funds to pay these much lower residual service costs. The natural way to charge for the service of peer review then will be on a "no-fault basis," with the author's institution or funder paying for each round of refereeing, regardless of outcome (acceptance, revision/re-refereeing, or rejection). This will minimize cost while protecting against inflated acceptance rates and decline in quality standards. Among the many important implications of Houghton et al’s (2009) timely and illuminating JISC analysis of the costs and benefits of providing OA to peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journal articles one stands out as particularly compelling: It would yield an 8/1 benefit/cost ratio if the world’s peer-reviewed research were all self-archived by its authors so as to make it OA. This 8-fold benefit/cost ratio for providing Green OA is substantially higher than all the other potential combinations of alternatives to the status quo analyzed and compared by Houghton et al, including gold OA. This outcome is all the more significant in light of the fact that a transition to green OA self-archiving already rests entirely in the hands of the research community (researchers, their institutions and their funders), whereas a transition to gold OA publishing depends on the publishing community. Harnad, S. (2011) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green. Open Access Self-Archiving. Logos 21 (3-4): 86-93. Harnad, S. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus 28 (1): 55-59. Harnad, S. (2010) Open Access to Research: Changing Researcher Behavior Through University and Funder Mandates. In Parycek, P. & Prosser, A. (Eds.): EDEM2010: Proceedings of the 4th Inernational Conference on E-Democracy. Austrian Computer Society: 13-22 Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8). Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos. Harnad, S. (2008) How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates. Open Access Archivangelism 369 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) Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2011, in press) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.) Wednesday, May 4. 2011The Green Open Access Citation Advantage: Within-Journal Versus Between-Journal ComparisonsMiguel, 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.21532Miguel 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.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. 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!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 Friday, April 8. 2011RIN Report: The Green Road to Open Access is Wide Open
The Research Information Network (RIN) report (Cook et al 2011) basically confirms the immediate practical implication of the Houghton report (Houghton et al 2009): Provide green open access (OA) now (through researchers self-archiving the final refereed drafts of their journal articles in their institutional repositories). That is the solution that is entirely within the hands of the research community, and also the one that confers by far the greatest cost/benefit ratio.
Having reaffirmed this immediate practical course of action, that should have been the end of it. But the RIN report goes on to dip into three secondary issues that are, respectively, short-sighted, premature, and mistaken -- with respect to OA itself, as opposed to whether and when publishing converts from subscription-based to Gold OA: 1. Short-Sighted: It is short-sighted to estimate OA benefits from a national point of view, particularly for the Green OA option, which is already fully within the research community's reach, and is also the option that the RIN report, like the Houghton report, is recommending. Green OA self-archiving is not a subscription-cost-saving matter. It is a research-access matter. Journal contents have no national boundaries. The immediate benefit to the UK from providing Green OA to UK research output will be the enhanced uptake and impact of UK research globally. This will no doubt encourage the rest of the world to provide Green OA to their research output too. (It is not just the UK that is reading the Houghton and RIN reports.) As the rest of the world reciprocates with Green OA, the UK also gains in access to research from the rest of the world. Journal subscription cancelations -- if and when they are eventually induced by Green OA -- will not begin happening while only the UK contents of journals have been made Green OA. You can't cancel a journal because its UK-authored contents happen to be available free. Cancelations can only happen once the practice of Green OA self-archiving has become universal. In fact, the countries that are early adopters of Green OA self-archiving will derive an extra competitive advantage in the uptake and impact of their research output, until the playing field is levelled as other countries catch up by making their own research output Green too. 2. Premature: The RIN report dwells needlessly on how high article processing charges (APCs) for Gold OA could and should be. Not only are neither conversion to Gold OA publishing nor the APC asking price for Gold OA in the research community's hands, but it is particularly premature to focus on APC asking prices at a time when it is the Green OA option that is the optimal one, and entirely within the research community's reach, whereas only a minority of journals are as yet Gold OA. The market will take care of APCs if and when their time comes. Right now, OA itself is the priority, and the way to provide immediate OA is for universities and funders to provide Green OA, today, rather than to keep focusing instead on what the APCs for Gold might turn out to be if and when Green OA ever induces a transition to Gold OA. What is certain is that the money currently being paid out by institutions for publication -- in the form of institutional subscription fees -- is enough to cover the current costs of refereed research publication. That same money could pay for publication via Gold APCs, but if Gold OA comes into its own after universal Green OA has prevailed, Green OA itself, with its distributed network of institutional repositories, will have taken over the full burden of text-generation, archiving and access-provision that is currently being borne by publishers: The print and online edition of the journal will no longer need to be produced, the author's refereed final draft will become the version-of-record, and hence the APCs will shrink to just the cost of peer review. Today's Gold APC costs and estimates are certainly not based on such a post-Green scenario; hence calculations based on scaling those costs up to all journal articles are premature and irrelevant. 3. Mistaken: Coupled with the needless preoccupation with current and future Gold APCs -- at a time when what is really needed is full speed ahead with Green OA -- the RIN report curiously characterizes Green OA as "unsustainable." But what is it that's unsustainable? Certainly not OA self-archiving by authors: That can be done for every refereed paper published on the planet for as long as research continues to be conducted. Obviously what RIN means here is that Green OA might eventually make subscription publishing unsustainable. But if and when universal Green OA ever makes subscription publishing unsustainable that means subscriptions will be cancelled by institutions, journals will cut costs, downsize to providing peer review alone and convert to Gold OA APCs; and institutions will pay those much-reduced APCs out of a fraction of their annual windfall subscription cancelation savings. The RIN report's recommendations on the length of the delay (embargo) before publishers make their own versions-of-record OA -- like its premature preoccupation with the price of Gold APCs and its needless preoccupation with sustaining publishers' current revenue streams -- are irrelevant to Green OA. Green OA is based on the author's refereed final draft, not the publisher's version of record. Publisher embargoes on OA to the version of record are more a matter of the sustainability of subscription publishing, hence whether it continues to co-exist in parallel with Green OA or converts to Gold OA.
Saturday, April 2. 2011"The Sole Methodologically Sound Study of the Open Access Citation Advantage(!)"It is true that downloads of research findings are important. They are being measured, and the evidence of the open-access download advantage is growing. See: S. Hitchcock (2011) "The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies"But the reason it is the open-access citation advantage that is especially important is that refereed research is conducted and published so it can be accessed, used, applied and built upon in further research: Research is done by researchers, for uptake by researchers, for the benefit of the public that funds the research. Both research progress and researchers' careers and funding depend on research uptake and impact. The greatest growth potential for open access today is through open access self-archiving mandates adopted by the universal providers of research: the researchers' universities, institutions and funders (e.g., Harvard and MIT) . See the ROARMAP registry of open-access mandates. Universities adopt open access mandates in order to maximize their research impact. The large body of evidence, in field after field, that open access increases citation impact, helps motivate universities to mandate open access self-archiving of their research output, to make it accessible to all its potential users -- rather than just those whose universities can afford subscription access -- so that all can apply, build upon and cite it. (Universities can only afford subscription access to a fraction of research journals.) The Davis study lacks the statistical power to show what it purports to show, which is that the open access citation advantage is not causal, but merely an artifact of authors self-selectively self-archiving their better (hence more citable) papers. Davis's sample size was smaller than many of the studies reporting the open access citation advantage. Davis found no citation advantage for randomized open access. But that does not demonstrate that open access is a self-selection artifact -- in that study or any other study -- because Davis did not replicate the widely reported self-archiving advantage either, and that advantage is often based on far larger samples. So the Davis study is merely a small non-replication of a widely reported outcome. (There are a few other non-replications; but most of the studies to date replicate the citation advantage, especially those based on bigger samples.) Davis says he does not see why the inferences he attempts to make from his results -- that the reported open access citation advantage is an artifact, eliminated by randomization, that there is hence no citation advantage, which implies that there is no research access problem for researchers, and that researchers should just content themselves with the open access download advantage among lay users and forget about any citation advantage -- are not welcomed by researchers. These inferences are not welcomed because they are based on flawed methodology and insufficient statistical power and yet they are being widely touted -- particularly by the publishing industry lobby (see the spin FASEB is already trying to put on the Davis study: "Paid access to journal articles not a significant barrier for scientists"!) -- as being the sole methodologically sound test of the open access citation advantage! Ignore the many positive studies. They are all methodologically flawed. The definitive finding, from the sole methodologically sound study, is null. So there's no access problem, researchers have all the access they need -- and hence there's no need to mandate open access self-archiving. No, this string of inferences is not a "blow to open access" -- but it would be if it were taken seriously. What would be useful and opportune at this point would be meta-analysis. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum EnablingOpenScholarship The Sound of One Hand ClappingSuppose many studies report that cancer incidence is correlated with smoking and you want to demonstrate in a methodologically sounder way that this correlation is not caused by smoking itself, but just an artifact of the fact that the same people who self-select to smoke are also the ones who are more prone to cancer. So you test a small sample of people randomly assigned to smoke or not, and you find no difference in their cancer rates. How can you know that your sample was big enough to detect the repeatedly reported correlation at all unless you test whether it's big enough to show that cancer incidence is significantly higher for self-selected smoking than for randomized smoking? Many studies have reported a statistically significant increase in citations for articles whose authors make them OA by self-archiving them. To show that this citation advantage is not caused by OA but just a self-selection artifact (because authors selectively self-archive their better, more citeable papers), you first have to replicate the advantage itself, for the self-archived OA articles in your sample, and then show that that advantage is absent for the articles made OA at random. But Davis showed only that the citation advantage was absent altogether in his sample. The most likely reason for that is that the sample was much too small (36 journals, 712 articles randomly OA, 65 self-archived OA, 2533 non-OA). In a recent study (Gargouri et al 2010) we controlled for self-selection using mandated (obligatory) OA rather than random OA. The far larger sample (1984 journals, 3055 articles mandatorily OA, 3664 self-archived OA, 20,982 non-OA) revealed a statistically significant citation advantage of about the same size for both self-selected and mandated OA. If and when Davis's requisite self-selected self-archiving control is ever tested, the outcome will either be (1) the usual significant OA citation advantage in the self-archiving control condition that most other published studies have reported -- in which case the absence of the citation advantage in Davis's randomized condition would indeed be evidence that the citation advantage had been a self-selection artifact that was then successfully eliminated by the randomization -- or (more likely, I should think) (2) no significant citation advantage will be found in the self-archiving control condition either, in which case the Davis study will prove to have been just one non-replication of the usual significant OA citation advantage (perhaps because of Davis's small sample size, the fields, or the fact that most of the non-OA articles become OA on the journal's website after a year). (There have been a few other non-replications; but most studies replicate the OA citation advantage, especially the ones based on larger samples.) Until that requisite self-selected self-archiving control is done, this is just the sound of one hand clapping. Readers can be trusted to draw their own conclusions as to whether Davis's study, tirelessly touted as the only methodologically sound one to date, is that -- or an exercise in advocacy. Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research (2010) PLOS ONE 5 (10) (authors: Gargouri, Y., Hajjem, C., Lariviere, V., Gingras, Y., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S.) Thursday, March 31. 2011On Methodology and Advocacy: Davis's Randomization Study of the OA AdvantageOpen access, readership, citations: a randomized controlled trial of scientific journal publishing doi:10.1096/fj.11-183988fj.11-183988Sorry to disappoint! Nothing new to cut-and-paste or reply to: Still no self-selected self-archiving control, hence no basis for the conclusions drawn (to the effect that the widely reported OA citation advantage is merely an artifact of a self-selection bias toward self-archiving the better, hence more citeable articles -- a bias that the randomization eliminates). The methodological flaw, still uncorrected, has been pointed out before. If and when the requisite self-selected self-archiving control is ever tested, the outcome will either be (1) the usual significant OA citation advantage in the self-archiving control condition that most other published studies have reported -- in which case the absence of the citation advantage in Davis's randomized condition would indeed be evidence that the citation advantage had been a self-selection artifact that was then successfully eliminated by the randomization -- or (more likely, I should think) (2) there will be no significant citation advantage in the self-archiving control condition either, in which case the Davis study will prove to have been just a non-replication of the usual significant OA citation advantage (perhaps because of Davis's small sample size, the fields, or the fact that most of the non-OA articles become OA on the journal's website after a year). Until the requisite self-selected self-archiving control is done, this is just the sound of one hand clapping. Readers can be trusted to draw their own conclusions as to whether this study, tirelessly touted as the only methodologically sound one to date, is that -- or an exercise in advocacy. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum EnablingOpenScholarship Sunday, March 27. 2011Act by April 14 to expand the NIH policyAlliance for Taxpayer Access has links to the three websites where OA supporters are urged to press for extension of the expansion of the NIH OA policy to other US federal funding agencies. (I've just posted the text below to all three websites. To help help OA grow sooner rather than later, please do post your own support too.)
Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum EnablingOpenScholarship
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