Gunther Eysenbach, MD, MPH, is an Associate Professor of Health Policy, Management, and Evaluation at the University of Toronto and a Senior Scientist at the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation. He is the publisher and editor of the Journal of Medical Internet Research, a full-text, open-access (OA) journal....
Dr. Liolios: At MEDNET 2005, you reported some interesting data on the citation rate of OA articles, showing that OA articles are cited more often than non-OA articles.
Dr. Eysenbach: The OA study was a longitudinal bibliometric analysis of a cohort of OA and non-OA articles. While there have been other studies before that claimed that OA articles are more frequently cited, these previous studies all suffer from huge methodologic problems because they just compared crude citation counts of openly accessible articles on the Internet. You can’t just compare OA articles vs non-OA articles without adjusting for the many different confounders. To my knowledge, the study I presented is the first rigorous study that applied multiple regression techniques to adjust for the many possible confounders -- and it still found, after adjustment, that OA articles are 3 times more likely to be cited than non-OA articles in the first 10-16 months after publication. This is clear evidence of the fact that OA accelerates the speed with which new findings are taken up by peers. It ultimately speeds up the pace of progress and knowledge translation....
Dr. Liolios: You are an advocate of OA journals. Can you please tell us what prompted you to support this type of publishing?
Dr. Eysenbach: I am a "moderate" advocate of OA publishing, in a sense that I think in the future there will be a role for both business models, author-pays and reader-pays. I don’t evangelize. As a researcher who publishes his own research, I like OA because it is being read not only by fellow researchers, but also by consumers and policy makers, who would normally not open a scientific journal. My personal experience is also that -- unless you have a top paper that is publishable in one of the 5 major general medical journals -- it is always better to publish in an OA journal than in a toll-access specialist journal. Papers in specialist journals are only noticed by a small community, whereas OA gives you more visibility across disciplines -- suddenly your work is also cited by other specialties and disciplines....And finally, as a taxpayer I like OA, because I think it is madness to fund research with public money and then have to let the public buy back the research results. I strongly believe that funding agencies should make OA publishing mandatory.
Dr. Liolios: Is there opposition from the established pay-per-view journals?
Dr. Eysenbach: Absolutely, there is opposition....
Dr. Liolios: Some argue that OA may be associated with less [rigorous] peer-review and quality.
Dr. Eysenbach: Clearly no. OA and the rigor of peer-review and quality have nothing to do with each other. There are good and bad journals in both groups. There are OA journals with very rigorous peer-review, for example JMIR, PLoS, Medscape's MedGenMed. The argument has been made that OA journals may be tempted to accept anything just to cash in on the article processing fee, but one can also argue that there are terrible subscription-based journals out there that just about accept everything to fill their pages. Editors in both groups are well aware that maintaining a high level of quality is key to a journal's survival.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/25/2006 10:32:00 AM.
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.
