Open Access News

Abstract: 'The use of citation counts to assess the impact of research articles is well established. However, the citation impact of an article can only be measured several years after it has been published. As research articles are increasingly accessed through the Web, the number of times an article is downloaded can be instantly recorded and counted. One would expect the number of times an article is read to be related both to the number of times it is cited and to how old the article is. This paper analyses how short-term Web usage impact predicts medium-term citation impact. The physics e-print archive -- arXiv.org -- is used to test this.'

Conclusion: 'Whereas the significance of citation impact is well established, access of research literature via the Web provides a new metric for measuring the impact of articles – Web download impact. Download impact is useful for at least two reasons: (1) The portion of download variance that is correlated with citation counts provides an early-days estimate of probable citation impact that can begin to be tracked from the instant an article is made Open Access and that already attains its maximum predictive power after 6 months. (2) The portion of download variance that is uncorrelated with citation counts provides a second, partly independent estimate of the impact of an article, sensitive to another form of research usage that is not reflected in citations (Kurtz 2004). This study found a significant and sizeable correlation of approximately 0.4 between the citation and download impact of articles in physics and mathematics. This was based on Web downloads from the UK arXiv.org mirror only, and on those citations that could be automatically found and linked by Citebase. The true correlation may in fact prove somewhat higher once more download sites are monitored and automatic linking becomes more accurate. It will no doubt vary from field to field, and may also change as the proportion of Open Access content (now 10-20%) approaches 100%.'

At the same time SPARC has also released the finalized version of its Author's Addendum to help authors of journal articles retain the rights they need to authorize OA. The new version includes language for NIH-funded authors planning to deposit articles arising from their NIH-funded research in PubMed Central.

(PS: As far as I know, the CC search engine is the only publicly available search engine to read the machine-readable CC licenses and make that licensing information available to users through annotations and search filters. However, any other search engine could add these features at any time. Why the delay? If they're waiting for a critical mass of CC content, I would think it's already there. If they're waiting for perceived user demand, then let your favorite search engine know that this is something you care about.)

In order to implement the Berlin Declaration institutions should

1. Implement a policy to require their researchers to deposit a copy of all their published articles in an open access repository, and

2. Encourage their researchers to publish their research articles in open access journals where a suitable journal exists and provide the support [i.e. pay the processing fees] to enable that to happen.

(PS: Two quick replies. (1) If letting private-sector publishers be the sole distributors of publicly-funded research means that taxpayers have to pay high prices to read it, then it's a bad deal and the government has a responsibility to fix it, even if the private-sector publishers are excellent, innovative, and heavily-invested. (2) The NIH's distribution system depends on a public subsidy, but so does the one represented by the AAP. Private-sector publishers depend essentially on at least three forms of public investment: publicly-funded research, researchers employed by public universities, and subscription fees paid by public universities with public funds.)

(PS: You may know Charles as the man behind the monumental Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, currently up to Version 57. You should also know his Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog.)

(PS: If we had a good solution to the orphan works problem, then more works would be legally eligible for OA. It's that simple. A good solution would make it easier (1) to find rights holders for the purpose of requesting permission, (2) to use work without permission when the rights holder could not be found after a reasonable effort, and (3) to move works from the domain of copyright protection into the public domain when the rights holder no longer cared to enforce his/her rights. Please submit a comment to the Copyright Office and do what you can to ensure that we get such a good solution in the U.S.)

(PS: A lengthy critique of the upfront funding model for OA journals. It does not address OA archiving. Stern's argument will take some time to digest, but it seems to assume that OA is a business model rather than a form of access compatible with many different business models, that virtually all OA journals charge author-side processing fees and that these fees would always be paid by universities, that OA journals are just as expensive to produce as TA journals, and that preserving the "commercial aspects of the existing journal publication system" is a criterion. It also assumes, at least in asides, and inconsistently, that the upfront funding model was proposed as a diversionary tactic by TA publishers and that OA depends on altruism more than self-interest.)

On other subjects: 'Delegates to the Berlin No 3 open access conference yesterday, however, heard Alma Swan, of the market researchers Key Perspectives, who has studied the impact of a long-established physics repository on two learned societies. She found their journal subscriptions had merely declined in line with the rest of the market and "learned societies are not going bankrupt as a result of self-archiving"....Delegates also heard from Tony Hey, who works with the government as director of E-Science UK to foster better sharing of scientific data, about recent steps to have not just research but data freely available on the internet from research laboratories such as Cern in Switzerland. "We're trying to do what the internet was built for," he said.'

From the February issue of Scientific Computing Newsline: 'The objective of the EMBRACE initiative is to enable providers of life science data to create searchable interfaces to their databases that conform to a common set of standards. By applying this method to Europe's largest and most widely-used biomolecular databases, the consortium hopes to maximise the access to and value of these resources. "Many elegant and powerful computational biology tools are under-utilised," said consortium member Erik Bongcam-Rudloff from Sweden's University of Uppsala. "EMBRACE will allow us to unlock their potential by standardising access to them." See: http://www.ebi.ac.uk and http://www.embl.de.'