22 November 2008
| Open Access Articles Generate Diversity While Citations Remain Steady |
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| Science - Science Enterprise | |||
| Written by TS-Si News Service | |||
| Wednesday, 06 August 2008 16:30 | |||
Ithaca, NY, USA. Policies supporting Open Access (OA) to digital scientific and scholarly material have been in place long enough to start serious measurement of actual effects. OA is free, immediate, permanent, full-text, online access, for any user, web-wide, to primarily research articles published in peer-reviewed journals. [N1]
OA means that any individual user, anywhere, who has access to the Internet, may link, read, download, store, print-off, use, and data-mine the digital content of that article. An OA article usually has limited copyright and licensing restrictions.
Open access publishing, article downloads, and citations: randomised controlled trial. Philip M Davis, Bruce V Lewenstein, Daniel H Simon, James G Booth, Mathew J L Connolly. British Medical Journal ePub ahead of print 31 July 2008. 337:a568 doi: 10.1136 / bmj.a568 [ Download PDF ]
There are many reasons to support Open Access. [N1] However, some recent research suggests there is no citation advantage in Open Access. Their main point of researchers from Cornell University, OA articles are read more, but the rate of citation is about the same. The researchers suggest that as more journals open up, the rate at which they are cited remains steady. In other words, the researchers read more but become more selective (in relative terms).
The reason, suggest Cornell graduate student Philip Davis and colleagues [N2-3], is that most researchers probably already have all the access they need to relevant articles.
Open access (OA) is free, immediate, permanent, full-text, online access, for any user, web-wide, to digital scientific and scholarly material, primarily research articles published in peer-reviewed journals. OA means that any individual user, anywhere, who has access to the Internet, may link, read, download, store, print-off, use, and data-mine the digital content of that article. An OA article usually has limited copyright and licensing restrictions.
"It appears that higher quality articles — in other words, more citable articles — are simply made freely available," said Davis. "Previous studies using different methods simply got cause and effect reversed." The study is published online in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). [Citation]
The researchers conducted the first controlled study of open-access publishing, randomly making some journal articles freely available while keeping others available by subscription only, to determine whether increased access to journal articles results in more article downloads and citations.
They found that in the year after the articles were published, open-access articles were downloaded more but were no more likely to be cited than subscription-based articles.
"The established dogma is that freely available scientific articles are cited more because they are read more," said Davis, a former science librarian who designed the study. "We found that open-access publishing may reach more readers than subscription-access publishing, but there is no evidence that freely accessible articles are cited any more than subscription-access articles."
The researchers randomly assigned 247 articles in 11 scientific journals, to free access. They measured how many times these articles were downloaded, the number of unique visitors to each article and how many times each article was cited.
"There were definitely more article downloads for freely accessible articles," said Davis. "Yet nearly half of these downloads were by Internet indexing robots like Google, crawling the Web for free content."
"There are many reasons to provide free access to the literature," said Davis. "A citation advantage, however, is not one of them."
Limitations. The findings are particularly relevant to academic researchers, because the frequency with which a researcher's work is cited can be a factor in tenure and promotion decisions.
However, the findings do not speak directly to overlapping research efforts (with different calendar priorities). Nor do the current findings approach the questions of grant research in advance of award and forward-looking research that may not have an impact until a much later date.
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| Last Updated on Thursday, 07 August 2008 04:39 |
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The TS-Si News Service is a collaboration of TS-Si staff, contributors, and corresponding institutions. Contents do not necessarily convey official positions of TS-Si, its partners, or affiliates