Open Access News

Alma Swan, The science and the say-so, Optimal Scholarship, December 21, 2007.  Excerpt:

...In a new blog posting pleading for a more scientific approach to studies on science publishing (subtext: Open Access proponents cook the books), Joe Esposito takes issue with a number of studies on Open Access on the grounds that they are not what he terms ‘scientific’. He also suggests that I am ‘behind’ these things, thus according me far more credit than I warrant, but since I am mentioned (twice, indeed) and a lot of people seem to be somewhat confused about the issues Mr Esposito raises, I thought it might help to clarify the situation.

The first contention is that OA proponents imply that librarians are stupid. The reason we must think them stupid, apparently, is that we say they won’t necessarily cancel subscriptions to journals whose contents can be obtained for free in Open Access form on the Web. But that misses the point: we say that cancellations won’t necessarily occur because that is what we observe, in real life....

This is the one experiment that has actually been conducted so far – by the community itself, by way of everyday practice – on the effect of Open Access on journal cancellations. (Oh, and just to forestall the “Ah, but arXiv only contains preprints” chorus, the data show that more than half of the articles in arXiv are postprints, i.e. the peer-reviewed version.) ...

There are a number of straightforward reasons, listed here and here, for preferring to continue to subscribe to journals – journals are more than just articles and contain other types of content that people want to read; they contain the final polished-up versions of articles whereas OA versions are simply the author’s final product; there is no guarantee that every article from a journal will be made OA by its author. Some of these may not hold up forever. We will start to see which journals have true added value – that is, something that customers will pay for – and which are just a collection of articles: the marketplace will reveal that. There are also other reasons, ones not so straightforward and certainly not so easy to describe. They are to do with allegiances to certain publishers, particularly specific society publishers who are viewed as ‘the good guys’ and thus worthy of loyalty; they are to do, partly, with the sorts of deals that publishers are prepared to offer in every individual case; and then they are very much to do with the views of faculty, without which no librarian makes a final decision on what to cut and what to reprieve....

The second point at issue is about a statistic. I was responsible for collecting the data behind this statistic....

The question was ‘What would be your response if your employer or research funder required you to make your work Open Access’, and respondents were offered three options:

• I would comply willingly
• I would comply reluctantly
• I would not comply

The result was that 81% of respondents agreed with the first statement – they would comply willingly. 14% agreed with the second, and 5% agreed with the third.

Back to the present, and Mr Esposito’s argument....He says: “it was found that 81% of researchers say that they would comply with mandates. Now, what does this prove exactly? More than 81% of Americans comply for the most part with the U.S. Tax Code, but that is hardly indicative of support for the current administration or the way tax monies are spent. What it does reveal is a healthy respect for the punitive powers of The Man....”

Bong! What was actually found was that 81% of researchers say they would comply willingly with mandates....

Now to the third point. Here it is: “A more complicated item, and one that is more susceptible to reasoned argument, is what is called the Open Access Advantage. No, this is not a frequent flier program but the notion that authors who work in OA formats are more likely to be cited than authors who work in proprietary or “toll-access” media. Superficially, this may appear to make sense; after all, if everyone can read an OA article, surely it has a better chance of getting cited than an article that has more limited distribution by virtue of the constraints imposed by subscription barriers. On the other hand, an article in the toll-access Lancet is much more likely to be cited than an article deposited in a no-name repository, with only Google keyword searching enabling the poor, already overburdened reader. Once again we find Alma Swan behind this [sic - AS]. The problem with the alleged Open Access Advantage is, first, it entirely ignores the overall marketing context of any particular work. The fact is that some OA venues are brilliantly marketed; I would point to the Public Library of Science in particular. But marketing is not a constant; it varies journal by journal, issue by issue, and article by article. Swan’s analysis does not take these variables into account.”

Oh dear. What a mix-up....Unfortunately, Mr Esposito comes to his own conclusions about the Open Access Advantage without seemingly having read the studies that demonstrate it. He also appears misinformed about the authorship of studies in this area, by the way. I am flattered by the attention and attribution, but none of the studies were my work. Anyway, his thesis seems to be that the OA Advantage – the increase in citations that OA articles in general enjoy over those that are not Open Access – is all to do with which journal they are published in, and the marketing success thereof.

Another bit of say-so, I’m afraid. I am not aware of any studies that have been guilty of such sloppy design, and would be very surprised if anyone could point me at one that is. There have been several studies that have used good methodologies, including those by Kristin Antelman and Michael Kurtz and co-workers. But the one I normally use to support the statement that OA enhances citations is that done by Stevan Harnad and his groups in Montreal and Southampton, whose methodology is utterly sound. It is here for those who wish to make a proper critical appraisal of the work....

Two articles from the same issue of the same journal are as near-identical in characteristics as is possible to be, so this is a highly controlled experiment. The citations to such paired articles were compared and measured. The aggregated results for different scholarly disciplines showed that in every discipline there is an increase in citations for OA articles compared with citations for non-OA articles. The graph that illustrates the findings is in this article. They have to be explained by Open Access. There is no ‘marketing’ issue involved at all; and no comparing different journals, different fields...or different publishers....