Abstract: The United Kingdom is not yet maximising the return on its public investment in research. Research Councils UK (RCUK) spend £3.5 billion pounds annually. The UK produces at least 130,000 research journal articles per year, but if it is worth funding and doing at all, research must be not only published, but used, applied and built upon by other researchers (‘citation impact’). The online-age practice of self-archiving has been shown to increase citation impact by a dramatic 50-250%, but so far only 15% of researchers are doing it spontaneously. Citation impact is rewarded by universities (through promotions and salary increases) and by research-funders like RCUK (through grant funding and renewal) at a conservative estimate of £46 per citation. If we multiply this by the 85% of the UK's annual journal article output that is not yet self-archived, this translates into an annual loss of £2,541,500 in revenue to UK researchers for not having done (or delegated) the few extra keystrokes per article it would have taken to self-archive their final drafts. But this impact loss translates into a far bigger one for the British public, if we reckon it as the loss of potential returns on its research investment. As a proportion of the RCUK’s yearly £3.5bn research expenditure, our conservative estimate would be 50% x 85% x £3.5.bn = £1.5bn worth of loss in potential research impact. The solution is obvious, and it is the one the RCUK is proposing: to extend the existing universal 'publish or perish' requirement to 'publish and also self-archive your final draft on your institutional website'. The time to close this 50%-250% research impact gap is already well overdue. This is the historic moment for the UK to set an example for the world, showing how to maximise the return on the public investment in research in the online era.
Also see the University of Southampton's press release on Harnad's research:
The UK is losing around £1.5 billion annually in the potential impact of its scientific research expenditure, according to one of the key figures in the global open access publishing movement. Professor Stevan Harnad, Moderator of the American Scientist Open Access Forum and Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science, has calculated the potential return on the investment in scientific research findings that are being lost to the UK each year through the limitations of the current academic publishing environment....He reveals today that the calculations of the value of research impact to be gained by a universal policy of self-archiving indicates a figure of at least £1.5 billion's worth annually. 'This is actually a conservative estimate,' says Harnad. 'It also takes no account of the much wider loss in revenue from potential usage and applications of UK research findings in the UK and worldwide, nor the still more general loss to the progress of human inquiry.' He is calling for a full acceptance of the RCUK recommendation. 'We know that 90 per cent of journals already endorse author self-archiving,' he says, 'and that over 90 per cent of authors will comply. 'This is a historic moment for the UK to set an example for the world,' he concludes, 'showing how to maximize the return on public investment in research in the online era.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/14/2005 02:37:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
