Summary: Astronomy is unusual among research fields in that all research-active astronomers already have full online access to all relevant journal articles via institutional subscriptions (because astronomy has only a small closed circle of core journals). Many astronomy articles are also self-archived as preprints prior to peer review and publication, but usage all shifts to the published version as soon as it is available. Self-archiving, even where it is at or near 100%, has no effect at all on subscriptions or cancellations. The Open Access (OA) citation advantage hence reduces to merely an "Early Access Advantage" in astronomy, because all postprints are accessible to everyone. There is also the much-reported positive correlation between the citation counts of articles and the proportion of them that were self-archived. This is no doubt partly a self-selection effect or "Quality Bias" -- with the better articles more likely to be self-archived. But this is unlikely to be all or most of the source of the OA advantage even in astronomy -- let alone in most other fields, where the postprints are not all accessible to all active researchers. The most important component of the OA advantage in general is that OA removes the access and usage barriers that prevent the better work from having its full potential impact (Quality Advantage). In astronomy, where those access barriers hardly exist, there is still a measurable OA advantage, but mostly just because of Early Advantage (and self-selection). With all postprints accessible, Competitive Advantage is restricted to the prepublication phase; Usage Advantage (downloads) can be estimated: downloads are doubled by universal online accessibility. And the Quality Advantage no doubt persists (though it is difficult to estimate independently).
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/15/2006 09:13:00 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.
