Open Access Archivangelism - Methodology

Paid-Gold OA, Free-Gold OA & Journal Quality Standards

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 16:37:17 +0100

Peter Suber has pointed out that "About 50% of articles published in peer-reviewed OA journals are published in fee-based journals" (as reported by Laakso & Bjork 2012).

Laakso & Bjork also report that "[12% of] articles published during 2011 and indexed in the most comprehensive article-level index of scholarly articles (Scopus) are available OA through journal publishers... immediately...".

That's 12% immediate Gold-OA for the (already selective) SCOPUS sample. The percentage is still smaller for the more selective Thomson-Reuters/ISI sample.

I think it cannot be left out of the reckoning about paid-Gold OA vs. free-Gold OA that:

(#1) most articles are not published as Gold OA at all today (neither paid-Gold nor free-Gold)

(#2) the articles of the quality that users need and want most are much less likely to be published as Gold OA (whether paid-Gold or free-Gold) today, and, most important,

(#3) the Gold OA articles of the quality that users need and want most today are less likely to be the free-Gold ones than the paid-Gold ones (even though the junk journals on Jeffrey Beall's "predatory" Gold OA journal list are all paid-Gold).

#2 and #3 are hypotheses, but I think they can be tested objectively.

A test for #2 would be to compare the download and citation counts (not the journal impact factors) for Gold OA (including hybrid Gold) articles vs non-Gold subscription journal articles (excluding the ones that have been made Green OA) within the same subject (and language!) area.

A test for #3 would be to compare the download and citation counts (not the journal impact factors) for paid-Gold (including hybrid Gold) vs free-gold articles within the same subject (and language!) area.

I mention this because I think just comparing the number of paid-Gold vs. free-Gold journals without taking quality into account could be misleading.

Comparing Carrots and Lettuce

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 13:42:55 +0100

These are comments on Stephen Curry's
"The inexorable rise of open access scientific publishing".

Our (Gargouri, Lariviere, Gingras, Carr & Harnad) estimate (for publication years 2005-2010, measured in 2011, based on articles published in the c. 12,000 journals indexed by Thomson-Reuters ISI) is 35% total OA in the UK (10% above the worldwide total OA average of 25%): This is the sum of both Green and Gold OA.

Our sample yields a Gold OA estimate much lower than Laakso & Björk's. Our estimate of about 25% OA worldwide is composed of 22.5% Green plus 2.5% Gold. And the growth rate of neither Gold nor (unmandated) Green is exponential.

There are a number of reasons neither "carrots vs. lettuce" nor "UK vs. non-UK produce" nor L&B estimates vs. G et al estimates can be compared or combined in a straightforward way.

Please take the following as coming from a fervent supporter of OA, not an ill-wisher, but one who has been disappointed across the long years by far too many failures to seize the day -- amidst surges of "tipping-point" euphoria -- to be ready once again to tout triumph.

First, note that the hubbub is yet again about Gold OA (publishing), even though all estimates agree that there is far less of Gold OA than there is of Green OA (self-archiving), and even though it is Green OA that can be fast-forwarded to 100%: all it takes is effective Green OA mandates (I will return to this point at the end).

So Stephen Curry asks why there is a discrepancy between our (Gargouri et al) estimates of Gold OA -- in the UK and worldwide (c. <5%) -- the estimates of Laakso & Björk (17%). Here are some of the multiple reasons (several of them already pointed out by Richard van Noorden in his comments too):

1. Thomson-Reuters ISI Subset: Our estimates are based solely on articles in the Thomson-Reuters ISI database of c. 12,000 journals. This database is more selective than the SCOPUS database on which L&B's sample is based. The more selective journals have higher quality standards and are hence the ones that both authors and users prefer.

(Without getting into the controversy about journal citation impact factors, another recent L&B study has shown that the higher the journal's impact factor, the less likely that the journal is Gold OA. -- But let me add that this is now likely to change, because of the perverse effects of the Finch Report and the RCUK OA Policy: Thanks to the UK's announced readiness to divert UK research funds to double-paying subscription journal publishers for hybrid Gold OA, most journals, including the top journals, will soon be offering hybrid Gold OA -- a very pricey way to add the UK's 6% of worldwide research output to the worldwide Gold OA total: The very same effect could be achieved free of extra cost if RCUK instead adopted a compliance-verification mechanism for its existing Green OA mandates.)

2. Embargoed "Gold OA": L&B included in their Gold OA estimates "OA" that was embargoed for a year. That's not OA, and certainly should not be credited to the total OA for any given year -- whence it is absent -- but to the next year. By that time, the Green OA embargoes of most journals have already expired. So, again, any OA purchased in this pricey way -- instead of for a few extra cost-free keystrokes by the author, for Green -- is more of a head-shaker than occasion for heady triumph.

3. 1% Annual Growth: The 1% annual growth of Gold OA is not much headway either, if you do the growth curves for the projected date they will reach 100%! (The more heady Gold OA growth percentages are not Gold OA growth as a percentage of all articles published, but Gold OA growth as a percentage of the preceding year's Gold OA articles.)

4. Green Achromatopsia: The relevant data for comparing Gold OA -- both its proportion and its growth rate -- with Green come from a source L&B do not study, namely, institutions with (effective) Green OA mandates. Here the proportions within two years of mandate adoption (60%+) and the subsequent growth rate toward 100% eclipse not only the worldwide Gold OA proportions and growth rate, but also the larger but still unimpressive worldwide Green OA proportions and growth rate for unmandated Green OA (which is still mostly all there is).

5. Mandate Effectiveness: Note also that RCUK's prior Green OA mandate was not an effective one (because it had no compliance verification mechanism), even though it may have increased UK OA (35%) by 10% over the global average (25%).

Stephen Curry: "A cheaper green route is also available, whereby the author usually deposits an unformatted version of the paper in a university repository without incurring a publisher's charge, but it remains to be seen if this will be adopted in practice. Universities and research institutions are only now beginning to work out how to implement the new policy (recently clarified by the RCUK)."

Well, actually RCUK has had Green OA mandates for over a half-decade now. But RCUK has failed to draw the obvious conclusion from its pioneering experiment -- which is that the RCUK mandates require an effective compliance-verification mechanism (of the kind that the effective university mandates have -- indeed, the universities themselves need to be recruited as the compliance-verifiers).

Instead, taking their cue from the Finch Report -- which in turn took its cue from the publisher lobby -- RCUK is doing a U-turn from its existing Green OA mandate, and electing to double-pay publishers for Gold instead.

A much more constructive strategy would be for RCUK to build on its belated grudging concession (that although Gold is RCUK's preference, RCUK fundees may still choose Green) by adopting an effective Green OA compliance verification mechanism. That (rather than the obsession with how to spend "block grants" for Gold) is what the fundees' institutions should be recruited to do for RCUK.

6. Discipline Differences: The main difference between the Gargouri, Lariviere, Gingras, Carr & Harnad estimates of average percent Gold in the ISI sample (2.5%) and the Laakso & Bjork estimates (10.3% for 2010) probably arise because L&B's sample included all ISI articles per year for 12 years (2000-2011), whereas ours was a sample of 1300 articles per year, per discipline, separately, for each of 14 disciplines, for 6 years (2005-2010: a total of about 100,000 articles).

7. Biomedicine Preponderance? Our sample was much smaller than L&B's because L&B were just counting total Gold articles, using DOAJ, whereas we were sending out a robot to look for Green OA versions on the Web for each of the 100,000 articles in our sample. It may be this equal sampling across disciplines that leads to our lower estimates of Gold: L&B's higher estimate may reflect the fact that certain disciplines are both more Gold and publish more articles (in our sample, Biomed was 7.9% Gold). Note that both studies agree on the annual growth rate of Gold (about 1%)

8. Growth Spurts? Our projection does not assume a linear year-to-year growth rate (1%), it detects it. There have so far been no detectable annual growth spurts (of either Gold or Green). (I agree, however, that Finch/RCUK could herald one forthcoming annual spurt of 6% Gold (the UK's share of world research output) -- but that would be a rather pricey (and, I suspect, unscaleable and unsustainable) one-off growth spurt. )

9. RCUK Compliance Verification Mechanism for Green OA Deposits: I certainly hope Stephen Curry is right that I am overstating the ambiguity of the RCUK policy!

But I was not at all reassured at the LSHTM meeting on Open Access by Ben Ryan's rather vague remarks about monitoring RCUK mandate compliance, especially compliance with Green. After all that (and not the failure to prefer and fund Gold) was the main weakness of the prior RCUK OA mandate.

Stevan Harnad

"The Sole Methodologically Sound Study of the Open Access Citation Advantage(!)"

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 01:32:47 +0100

Re: Chronicle of Higher Education

It is true that downloads of research findings are important. They are being measured, and the evidence of the open-access download advantage is growing. See:

S. Hitchcock (2011) "The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies"

A. Swan (2010) "The Open Access citation advantage: Studies and results to date"

B. Wagner (2010) "Open Access Citation Advantage: An Annotated Bibliography"

But the reason it is the open-access citation advantage that is especially important is that refereed research is conducted and published so it can be accessed, used, applied and built upon in further research: Research is done by researchers, for uptake by researchers, for the benefit of the public that funds the research. Both research progress and researchers' careers and funding depend on research uptake and impact.

The greatest growth potential for open access today is through open access self-archiving mandates adopted by the universal providers of research: the researchers' universities, institutions and funders (e.g., Harvard and MIT) . See the ROARMAP registry of open-access mandates.

Universities adopt open access mandates in order to maximize their research impact. The large body of evidence, in field after field, that open access increases citation impact, helps motivate universities to mandate open access self-archiving of their research output, to make it accessible to all its potential users -- rather than just those whose universities can afford subscription access -- so that all can apply, build upon and cite it. (Universities can only afford subscription access to a fraction of research journals.)

The Davis study lacks the statistical power to show what it purports to show, which is that the open access citation advantage is not causal, but merely an artifact of authors self-selectively self-archiving their better (hence more citable) papers. Davis's sample size was smaller than many of the studies reporting the open access citation advantage. Davis found no citation advantage for randomized open access. But that does not demonstrate that open access is a self-selection artifact -- in that study or any other study -- because Davis did not replicate the widely reported self-archiving advantage either, and that advantage is often based on far larger samples. So the Davis study is merely a small non-replication of a widely reported outcome. (There are a few other non-replications; but most of the studies to date replicate the citation advantage, especially those based on bigger samples.)

Davis says he does not see why the inferences he attempts to make from his results -- that the reported open access citation advantage is an artifact, eliminated by randomization, that there is hence no citation advantage, which implies that there is no research access problem for researchers, and that researchers should just content themselves with the open access download advantage among lay users and forget about any citation advantage -- are not welcomed by researchers.

These inferences are not welcomed because they are based on flawed methodology and insufficient statistical power and yet they are being widely touted -- particularly by the publishing industry lobby (see the spin FASEB is already trying to put on the Davis study: "Paid access to journal articles not a significant barrier for scientists"!) -- as being the sole methodologically sound test of the open access citation advantage! Ignore the many positive studies. They are all methodologically flawed. The definitive finding, from the sole methodologically sound study, is null. So there's no access problem, researchers have all the access they need -- and hence there's no need to mandate open access self-archiving.

No, this string of inferences is not a "blow to open access" -- but it would be if it were taken seriously.

What would be useful and opportune at this point would be meta-analysis.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
EnablingOpenScholarship

The Sound of One Hand Clapping

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 01:20:00 +0100

Re: Nature: The Great Beyond

Suppose many studies report that cancer incidence is correlated with smoking and you want to demonstrate in a methodologically sounder way that this correlation is not caused by smoking itself, but just an artifact of the fact that the same people who self-select to smoke are also the ones who are more prone to cancer. So you test a small sample of people randomly assigned to smoke or not, and you find no difference in their cancer rates. How can you know that your sample was big enough to detect the repeatedly reported correlation at all unless you test whether it's big enough to show that cancer incidence is significantly higher for self-selected smoking than for randomized smoking?

Many studies have reported a statistically significant increase in citations for articles whose authors make them OA by self-archiving them. To show that this citation advantage is not caused by OA but just a self-selection artifact (because authors selectively self-archive their better, more citeable papers), you first have to replicate the advantage itself, for the self-archived OA articles in your sample, and then show that that advantage is absent for the articles made OA at random. But Davis showed only that the citation advantage was absent altogether in his sample. The most likely reason for that is that the sample was much too small (36 journals, 712 articles randomly OA, 65 self-archived OA, 2533 non-OA).

In a recent study (Gargouri et al 2010) we controlled for self-selection using mandated (obligatory) OA rather than random OA. The far larger sample (1984 journals, 3055 articles mandatorily OA, 3664 self-archived OA, 20,982 non-OA) revealed a statistically significant citation advantage of about the same size for both self-selected and mandated OA.

If and when Davis's requisite self-selected self-archiving control is ever tested, the outcome will either be (1) the usual significant OA citation advantage in the self-archiving control condition that most other published studies have reported -- in which case the absence of the citation advantage in Davis's randomized condition would indeed be evidence that the citation advantage had been a self-selection artifact that was then successfully eliminated by the randomization -- or (more likely, I should think) (2) no significant citation advantage will be found in the self-archiving control condition either, in which case the Davis study will prove to have been just one non-replication of the usual significant OA citation advantage (perhaps because of Davis's small sample size, the fields, or the fact that most of the non-OA articles become OA on the journal's website after a year). (There have been a few other non-replications; but most studies replicate the OA citation advantage, especially the ones based on larger samples.)

Until that requisite self-selected self-archiving control is done, this is just the sound of one hand clapping.

Readers can be trusted to draw their own conclusions as to whether Davis's study, tirelessly touted as the only methodologically sound one to date, is that -- or an exercise in advocacy.

Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research (2010) PLOS ONE 5 (10) (authors: Gargouri, Y., Hajjem, C., Lariviere, V., Gingras, Y., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S.)

On Methodology and Advocacy: Davis's Randomization Study of the OA Advantage

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 14:29:03 +0100

Open access, readership, citations: a randomized controlled trial of scientific journal publishing doi:10.1096/fj.11-183988fj.11-183988
Philip M. Davis: "Published today in The FASEB Journal we report the findings of our randomized controlled trial of open access publishing on article downloads and citations. This study extends a prior study of 11 journals in physiology (Davis et al, BMJ, 2008) reported at 12 months to 36 journals covering the sciences, social sciences and humanities at 3yrs. Our initial results are generalizable across all subject disciplines: open access increases article downloads but has no effect on article citations... You may expect a routine cut-and-paste reply by S.H. shortly... I see the world as a more complicated and nuanced place than through the lens of advocacy."

Sorry to disappoint! Nothing new to cut-and-paste or reply to:

Still no self-selected self-archiving control, hence no basis for the conclusions drawn (to the effect that the widely reported OA citation advantage is merely an artifact of a self-selection bias toward self-archiving the better, hence more citeable articles -- a bias that the randomization eliminates). The methodological flaw, still uncorrected, has been pointed out before.

If and when the requisite self-selected self-archiving control is ever tested, the outcome will either be (1) the usual significant OA citation advantage in the self-archiving control condition that most other published studies have reported -- in which case the absence of the citation advantage in Davis's randomized condition would indeed be evidence that the citation advantage had been a self-selection artifact that was then successfully eliminated by the randomization -- or (more likely, I should think) (2) there will be no significant citation advantage in the self-archiving control condition either, in which case the Davis study will prove to have been just a non-replication of the usual significant OA citation advantage (perhaps because of Davis's small sample size, the fields, or the fact that most of the non-OA articles become OA on the journal's website after a year).

Until the requisite self-selected self-archiving control is done, this is just the sound of one hand clapping.

Readers can be trusted to draw their own conclusions as to whether this study, tirelessly touted as the only methodologically sound one to date, is that -- or an exercise in advocacy.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
EnablingOpenScholarship

Correlation, Causation, and the Weight of Evidence

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 02:55:55 +0100

SUMMARY: One can only speculate on the reasons why some might still wish to cling to the self-selection bias hypothesis in the face of all the evidence to date. It seems almost a matter of common sense that making articles more accessible to users also makes them more usable and citable -- especially in a world where most researchers are familiar with the frustration of arriving at a link to an article that they would like to read (but their institution does not subscribe), so they are asked to drop it into the shopping cart and pay $30 at the check-out counter. The straightforward causal relationship is the default hypothesis, based on both plausibility and the cumulative weight of the evidence. Hence the burden of providing counter-evidence to refute it is now on the advocates of the alternative.

Jennifer Howard ("Is there an Open-Access Advantage?," Chronicle of Higher Education, October 19 2010) seems to have missed the point of our article. It is undisputed that study after study has found that Open Access (OA) is correlated with higher probability of citation. The question our study addressed was whether making an article OA causes the higher probability of citation, or the higher probability causes the article to be made OA.

The latter is the "author self-selection bias" hypothesis, according to which the only reason OA articles are cited more is that authors do not make all articles OA: only the better ones, the ones that are also more likely to be cited.

The Davis et al study tested this by making articles -- 247 articles, from 11 biology journals -- OA randomly, instead of letting the authors choose whether or not to do it, self-selectively, and they found no increased citation for the OA articles one year after publication (although they did find increased downloads).

But almost no one finds that OA articles are cited more a year after publication. The OA citation advantage only becomes statistically detectable after citations have accumulated for 2-3 years.

Even more important, Davis et al. did not test the obvious and essential control condition in their randomized OA experiment: They did not test whether there was a statistically detectable OA advantage for self-selected OA in the same journals and time-window. You cannot show that an effect is an artifact of self-selection unless you show that with self-selection the effect is there, whereas with randomization it is not. All Davis et al showed was that there is no detectable OA advantage at all in their one-year sample (247 articles from 11 Biology journals); randomness and self-selection have nothing to do with it.

Davis et al released their results prematurely. We are waiting*,** to hear what Davis finds after 2-3 years, when he completes his doctoral dissertation. But if all he reports is that he has found no OA advantage at all in that sample of 11 biology journals, and that interval, rather than an OA advantage for the self-selected subset and no OA advantage for the randomized subset, then again, all we will have is a failure to replicate the positive effect that has now been reported by many other investigators, in field after field, often with far larger samples than Davis et al's.

*Note added October 31, 2010: Davis's dissertation turns out to have been posted on the same day as the present posting (October 20; thanks to Les Carr for drawing this to my attention on October 24!).
**Note added November 24, 2010: Phil Davis's results -- a replication of the OA download advantage and a non-replication of the OA citation advantage -- have since been published as: Davis, P. (2010) Does Open Access Lead to Increased Readership and Citations? A Randomized Controlled Trial of Articles Published in APS Journals. The Physiologist 53(6) December 2010.
Davis's results are welcome and interesting, and include some good theoretical insights, but insofar as the OA Citation Advantage is concerned, the empirical findings turn out to be just a failure to replicate the OA Citation Advantage in that particular sample and time-span -- exactly as predicted above. The original 2008 sample of 247 OA and 1372 non-OA articles in 11 journals one year after publication has now been extended to 712 OA and 2533 non-OA articles in 36 journals two years after publication. The result is a significant download advantage for OA articles but no significant citation advantage.

The only way to describe this outcome is as a non-replication of the OA Citation Advantage on this particular sample; it is most definitely not a demonstration that the OA Advantage is an artifact of self-selection, since there is no control group demonstrating the presence of the citation advantage with self-selected OA and the absence of the citation advantage with randomized OA across the same sample and time-span: There is simply the failure to detect any citation advantage at all.

This failure to replicate is almost certainly due to the small sample size as well as the short time-span. (Davis's a-priori estimates of the sample size required to detect a 20% difference took no account of the fact that citations grow with time; and the a-priori criterion fails even to be met for the self-selected subsample of 65.)

"I could not detect the effect in a much smaller and briefer sample than others" is hardly news! Compare the sample size of Davis's negative results with the sample-sizes and time-spans of some of the studies that found positive results:

Meanwhile, our study was similar to that of Davis et al's, except that it was a much bigger sample, across many fields, and a much larger time window -- and, most important, we did have a self-selective matched-control subset, which did show the usual OA advantage. Instead of comparing self-selective OA with randomized OA, however, we compared it with mandated OA -- which amounts to much the same thing, because the point of the self-selection hypothesis is that the author picks and chooses what to make OA, whereas if the OA is mandatory (required), the author is not picking and choosing, just as the author is not picking and choosing when the OA is imposed randomly.

And our finding is that the mandated OA advantage is just as big as the self-selective OA advantage.

As we discussed in our article, if someone really clings to the self-selection hypothesis, there are some remaining points of uncertainty in our study that self-selectionists can still hope will eventually bear them out: Compliance with the mandates was not 100%, but 60-70%. So the self-selection hypothesis has a chance of being resurrected if one argues that now it is no longer a case of positive selection for the stronger articles, but a refusal to comply with the mandate for the weaker ones. One would have expected, however, that if this were true, the OA advantage would at least be weaker for mandated OA than for unmandated OA, since the percentage of total output that is self-archived under a mandate is almost three times the 5-25% that is self-archived self-selectively. Yet the OA advantage is undiminished with 60-70% mandate compliance in 2002-2006. We have since extended the window by three more years, to 2009; the compliance rate rises by another 10%, but the mandated OA advantage remains undiminished. Self-selectionists don't have to cede till the percentage is 100%, but their hypothesis gets more and more far-fetched...

The other way of saving the self-selection hypothesis despite our findings is to argue that there was a "self-selection" bias in terms of which institutions do and do not mandate OA: Maybe it's the better ones that self-select to do so. There may be a plausible case to be made that one of our four mandated institutions -- CERN -- is an elite institution. (It is also physics-only.) But, as we reported, we re-did our analysis removing CERN, and we got the same outcome. Even if the objection of eliteness is extended to Southampton ECS, removing that second institution did not change the outcome either. We leave it to the reader to decide whether it is plausible to count our remaining two mandating institutions -- University of Minho in Portugal and Queensland University of Technology in Australia -- as elite institutions, compared to other universities. It is a historical fact, however, that these four institutions were the first in the world to elect to mandate OA.

One can only speculate on the reasons why some might still wish to cling to the self-selection bias hypothesis in the face of all the evidence to date. It seems almost a matter of common sense that making articles more accessible to users also makes them more usable and citable -- especially in a world where most researchers are familiar with the frustration of arriving at a link to an article that they would like to read (but their institution does not subscribe), so they are asked to drop it into the shopping cart and pay $30 at the check-out counter. The straightforward causal relationship is the default hypothesis, based on both plausibility and the cumulative weight of the evidence. Hence the burden of providing counter-evidence to refute it is now on the advocates of the alternative.

Davis, PN, Lewenstein, BV, Simon, DH, Booth, JG, & Connolly, MJL (2008) Open access publishing, article downloads, and citations: randomised controlled trial , British Medical Journal 337: a568

Gargouri, Y., Hajjem, C., Lariviere, V., Gingras, Y., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2010) Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research. PLOS ONE 10(5) e13636

Harnad, S. (2008) Davis et al's 1-year Study of Self-Selection Bias: No Self-Archiving Control, No OA Effect, No Conclusion. Open Access Archivangelism July 31 2008

Comparing OA and Non-OA: Some Methodological Supplements

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 02:31:02 +0100

Response to Martin Fenner's comments on Gargouri Y, Hajjem C, Larivière V, Gingras Y, Carr L, Brody T, Harnad S. (2010) Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research. PLoS ONE 5(10):e13636+. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013636.

(1) Yes, we cited the Davis et al study. That study does not show that the OA citation advantage is a result of self-selection bias. It simply shows (as many other studies have noted) that no OA advantage at all (whether randomized or self-selected) is detectable only a year after publication, especially in a small sample. It's since been over two years and we're still waiting to hear whether Davis et al's randomized sample still has no OA advantage while a self-selected control sample from the same journals and year does. That would be the way to show what the OA advantage is a self-selection bias. Otherwise it's just the sound of one hand clapping.
Harnad, S (2008) Davis et al's 1-year Study of Self-Selection Bias: No Self-Archiving Control, No OA Effect, No Conclusion. Open Access Archivangelism. July 31 2008.
(2) No, we did not look only at self-archiving in institutional repositories. Our matched-control sample of self-selected self-archived articles came from institutional repositories, central repositories, and authors' websites. (All of that is "Green OA.") It was only the mandated sample that was exclusively from institutional repositories. (Someone else may wish to replicate our study using funder-mandated self-archiving in central repositories. The results are likely to be much the same, but the design and analysis would be rather more complicated.)

(4) Yes, we systematically excluded articles in Gold OA journals from our sample, not because we do not believe that they generate the OA advantage too, but because it is impossible to do matched-control comparisons between OA and non-OA articles in the same journal issue with Gold OA journals, since all their articles are OA. (It would for much the same reason be difficult to do this comparison in a field where 100% of the articles were OA, even if we were interested in unrefereed preprints; but we were not: we were interested in open access to refereed journal articles.)

(5) As to the 60% mandated self-archiving rates: The institutions we studied had mandated OA in 2003-2004. Our test time-span was 2002-2006. At least two of those institutions (Southampton ECS and CERN) and probably the other two also (Minho and QUT) have deposit rates of close to 100% by now. (We have since extended the analyses to 2009 and found exactly the same result.)

(6) "What is wrong if [OA] rates are 15%"? We leave that to the reader as an exercise. That, after all, is what OA is all about. But surveys have shown -- and outcome studies have confirmed -- that although most researchers do not self-archive spontaneously, 95% report that they would self-archive if their institutions or funders required it, over 80% of them saying they would do it willingly. (Most don't self-archive spontaneously because of worries -- groundless worries -- that it might be illegal or might entail a lot of work.)

(7) Yes, "there are many reasons other than citation rates that make OA worthwhile," but if most researchers will only provide OA if it is mandated, then it is important to demonstrate to researchers why it is worth their while.

(8) If we have given "the impression that mandatory self-archiving of post-prints in institutional repositories is the only reasonable Open Access strategy," then we have succeeded in conveying the implication of our findings.

Swan, A. (2006) The culture of Open Access: researchers views and responses, in Jacobs, Neil, Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects. Chandos Publishing (Oxford) Limited.

Open Access: Self-Selected, Mandated & Random; Answers & Questions

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:53:52 +0000

What follows below is what we hope will be found to be a conscientious and attentive series of responses to questions raised by Phil Davis about our paper (Gargouri et al, currently under refereeing) -- responses for which we did further analyses of our data (not included in the draft under refereeing).

Gargouri, Y., Hajjem, C., Lariviere, V., Gingras, Y., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2010) Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research.(Submitted)

We are happy to have performed these further analyses, and we are very much in favor of this sort of open discussion and feedback on pre-refereeing preprints of papers that have been submitted and are undergoing peer review. They can only improve the quality of the eventual published version of articles.

However, having carefully responded to Phil's welcome questions, below, we will, at the end of this posting, ask Phil to respond in kind to a question that we have repeatedly raised about his own paper (Davis et al 2008), published a year and a half ago...

RESPONSES TO DAVIS'S QUESTIONS ABOUT OUR PAPER:

PD:
"Stevan, Granted, you may be more interested in what the referees of the paper have to say than my comments; I'm interested in whether this paper is good science, whether the methodology is sound and whether you interpret your results properly."

We are very appreciative of your concern and hope you will agree that we have not been interested only in what the referees might have to say. (We also hope you will now in turn be equally responsive to a longstanding question we have raised about your own paper on this same topic.)

PD:
"For instance, it is not clear whether your Odds Ratios are interpreted correctly. Based on Figure 4, OA article are MORE LIKELY to receive zero citations than 1-5 citations (or conversely, LESS LIKELY to receive 1-5 citations than zero citations). You write: "For example, we can say for the first model that for a one unit increase in OA, the odds of receiving 1-5 citations (versus zero citations) increased by a factor of 0.957 [re: Figure 4 (p.9)]"... I find your odds ratio methodology unnecessarily complex and unintuitive..."

Our article supports its conclusions with several different, convergent analyses. The logistical analysis with the odds ratio is one of them, and its results are fully corroborated by the other, simpler analyses we also reported, as well as the supplementary analyses we append here now.

[Yassine has since added that your confusion was our fault because by way of an illustration we had used the first model (0 citations vs. 1-5 citations), with its odds ratio of 0.957 ("For example, we can say for the first model that for a one unit increase in OA, the odds of receiving 1-5 citations (versus zero citations) increased by a factor of 0.957 "). In the first model the value 0.957 is below and too close to 1 to serve as a good illustration of the meaning of the odds ratio. We should have chosen a better example. one in which (Exp(ß) is clearly greater than 1. We should have said: "For example, we can say for the second model that for a one unit increase in OA, the odds of receiving 5-10 citations (versus 1-5 citations) increased by a factor of 1.323." This clearer example will be used in the revised text of the paper. (See Figure 4S with a translation to display the deviations relative to an odds ratio of one rather than zero {although Excel here insists on labelling the baseline "0" instead of "1"! This too will be fixed in the revised text}.]

PD:
"Similarly in Figure 4 (if I understand the axes correctly), CERN articles are more than twice as likely to be in the 20+ citation category than in the 1-5 citation category, a fact that may distort further interpretation of your data as it may be that institutional effects may explain your Mandated OA effect. See comments by Patrick Gaule and Ludo Waltman on the review"

Here is the analysis underlying Figure 4, re-done without CERN, and then again re-done without either CERN or Southampton. As will be seen, the outcome pattern, as well as its statistical significance, are the same whether or not we exclude these institutions. (Moreover, I remind you that those are multiple regression analyses in which the Beta values reflect the independent contributions of each of the variables: That means the significant OA advantage, whether or not we exclude CERN, is the contribution of OA independent of the contribution of each institution.)

SUPPLEMENTARY FIGURE S1

PD:
"Changing how you report your citation ratios, from the ratio of log citations to the log of citation ratios is a very substantial change to your paper and I am surprised that you point out this reporting error at this point."

As noted in Yassine's reply to Phil, that formula was incorrectly stated in our text, once; in all the actual computations, results, figures and tables, however, the correct formula was used.

PD:
"While it normalizes the distribution of the ratios, it is not without problems, such as: 1. Small citation differences have very large leverage in your calculations. Example, A=2 and B=1, log (A/B)=0.3"

The log of the citation ratio was used only in displaying the means (Figure 2), presented for visual inspection. The paired-sample t-tests of significance (Table 2) were based on the raw citation counts, not on log ratios, hence had no leverage in our calculations or their interpretations. (The paired-sample t-tests were also based only on 2004-2006, because for 2002-2003 not all the institutional mandates were yet in effect.)

Moreover, both the paired-sample t-test results (2004-2006) and the pattern of means (2002-2006) converged with the results of the (more complicated) logistical regression analyses and subdivisions into citation ranges.

PD:
"2. Similarly, any ratio with zero in the denominator must be thrown out of your dataset. The paper does not inform the reader on how much data was ignored in your ratio analysis and we have no information on the potential bias this may have on your results."

As noted, the log ratios were only used in presenting the means, not in the significance testing, nor in the logistic regressions.

However, we are happy to provide the additional information Phil requests, in order to help readers eyeball the means. Here are the means from Figure 2, recalculated by adding 1 to all citation counts. This restores all log ratios with zeroes in the numerator (sic); the probability of a zero in the denominator is vanishingly small, as it would require that all 10 same-issue control articles have no citations!

The pattern is again much the same. (And, as noted, the significance tests are based on the raw citation counts, which were not affected by the log transformations that exclude numerator citation counts of zero.)

SUPPLEMENTARY FIGURE S2
This exercise suggested a further heuristic analysis that we had not thought of doing in the paper, even though the results had clearly suggested that the OA advantage is not evenly distributed across the full range of article quality and citeability: The higher quality, more citeable articles gain more of the citation advantage from OA.

In the following supplementary figure (S3), for exploratory and illustrative purposes only, we re-calculate the means in the paper's Figure 2 separately for OA articles in the citation range 0-4 and for OA articles in the citation range 5+.

SUPPLEMENTARY FIGURE S3:
The overall OA advantage is clearly concentrated on articles in the higher citation range. There is even what looks like an OA DISadvantage for articles in the lower citation range. This may be mostly an artifact (from restricting the OA articles to 0-4 citations and not restricting the non-OA articles), although it may also be partly due to the fact that when unciteable articles are made OA, only one direction of outcome is possible, in the comparison with citation means for non-OA articles in the same journal and year: OA/non-OA citation ratios will always be unflattering for zero-citation OA articles. (This can be statistically controlled for, if we go on to investigate the distribution of the OA effect across citation brackets directly.)

PD:
"Have you attempted to analyze your citation data as continuous variables rather than ratios or categories?"

We will be doing this in our next study, which extends the time base to 2002-2008. Meanwhile, a preview is possible from plotting the mean number of OA and non-OA articles for each citation count. Note that zero citations is the biggest category for both OA and non-OA articles, and that the proportion of articles at each citation level decreases faster for non-OA articles than for OA articles; this is another way of visualizing the OA advantage. At citation counts of 30 or more, the difference is quite striking, although of course there are few articles with so many citations:

SUPPLEMENTARY FIGURE 4

REQUEST FOR RESPONSE TO QUESTION ABOUT DAVIS ET AL'S (2008) PAPER:

Davis, PN, Lewenstein, BV, Simon, DH, Booth, JG, & Connolly, MJL (2008)
Open access publishing, article downloads, and citations: randomised controlled trial British Medical Journal 337

Critique of Davis et al's paper: "Davis et al's 1-year Study of Self-Selection Bias: No Self-Archiving Control, No OA Effect, No Conclusion" BMJ Responses.

Davis et al had taken a 1-year sample of biological journal articles and randomly made a subset of them OA, to control for author self-selection. (This is comparable to our mandated control for author self-selection.) They reported that after a year, they found no significant OA Advantage for the randomized OA for citations (although they did find an OA Advantage for downloads) and concluded that this showed that the OA citation Advantage is just an artifact of author self-selection, now eliminated by the randomization.

What Davis et al failed to do, however, was to demonstrate that -- in the same sample and time-span -- author self-selection does generate the OA citation Advantage. Without showing that, all they have shown is that in their sample and time-span, they found no significant OA citation Advantage. This is no great surprise, because their sample was small and their time-span was short, whereas many of the other studies that have reported finding an OA Advantage were based on much larger samples and much longer time spans.

The question raised was about controlling for self-selected OA. If one tests for the OA Advantage, whether self-selected or randomized, there is a great deal of variability, across articles and disciplines, especially for the first year or so after publication. In order to have a statistically reliable measure of OA effects, the sample has to be big enough, both in number of articles and in the time allowed for any citation advantage to build up to become detectable and statistically reliable.

Davis et al need to do with their randomization methodology what we have done with our mandating methodology, namely, to demonstrate the presence of a self-selected OA Advantage in the same journals and years. Then they can compare that with randomized OA in those same journals and years, and if there is a significant OA Advantage for self-selected OA and no OA Advantage for randomized OA then they will have evidence that -- contrary to our findings -- some or all of the OA Advantage is indeed just a side-effect of self-selection. Otherwise, all they have shown is that with their journals, sample size and time-span, there is no detectable OA Advantage at all.

What Davis et al replied in their BMJ Authors' Response was instead this:

PD:
"Professor Harnad comments that we should have implemented a self-selection control in our study. Although this is an excellent idea, it was not possible for us to do so because, at the time of our randomization, the publisher did not permit author-sponsored open access publishing in our experimental journals. Nonetheless, self-archiving, the type of open access Prof. Harnad often refers to, is accounted for in our regression model (see Tables 2 and 3)... Table 2 Linear regression output reporting independent variable effects on PDF downloads for six months after publication Self-archived: 6% of variance p = .361 (i.e., not statistically significant)... Table 3 Negative binomial regression output reporting independent variable effects on citations to articles aged 9 to 12 months Self-archived: Incidence Rate 0.9 p = .716 (i.e., not statistically significant)..."

This is not an adequate response. If a control condition was needed in order to make an outcome meaningful, it is not sufficient to reply that "the publisher and sample allowed us to do the experimental condition but not the control condition."

Nor is it an adequate response to reiterate that there was no significant self-selected self-archiving effect in the sample (as the regression analysis showed). That is in fact bad news for the hypothesis being tested.

Nor is it an adequate response to say, as Phil did in a later posting, that even after another half year or more had gone by, there was still no significant OA Advantage. (That is just the sound of one hand clapping again, this time louder.)

The only way to draw meaningful conclusions from Davis et al's methodology is to demonstrate the self-selected self-archiving citation advantage, for the same journals and time-span, and then to show that randomization wipes it out (or substantially reduces it).

Until then, our own results, which do demonstrate the self-selected self-archiving citation advantage for the same journals and time-span (and on a much bigger and more diverse sample and a much longer time scale), show that mandating the self-archiving does not wipe out the citation advantage (nor does it substantially reduce it).

Meanwhile, Davis et al's finding that although their randomized OA did not generate a citation increase, it did generate a download increase, suggests that with a larger sample and time-span there may well be scope for a citation advantage as well: Our own prior work and that of others has shown that higher early download counts tend to lead to higher citation counts later.

Bollen, J., Van de Sompel, H., Hagberg, A. and Chute, R. (2009) A principal component analysis of 39 scientific impact measures in PLoS ONE 4(6): e6022,

Brody, T., Harnad, S. and Carr, L. (2006) Earlier Web Usage Statistics as Predictors of Later Citation Impact. Journal of the American Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) 57(8) 1060-1072.

Lokker, C., McKibbon, K. A., McKinlay, R.J., Wilczynski, N. L. and Haynes, R. B. (2008) Prediction of citation counts for clinical articles at two years using data available within three weeks of publication: retrospective cohort study BMJ, 2008;336:655-657

Moed, H. F. (2005) Statistical Relationships Between Downloads and Citations at the Level of Individual Documents Within a Single Journal. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 56(10): 1088- 1097

O'Leary, D. E. (2008) The relationship between citations and number of downloads Decision Support Systems 45(4): 972-980

Watson, A. B. (2009) Comparing citations and downloads for individual articles Journal of Vision 9(4): 1-4

Preference Surveys and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: Do Users Prefer No Access To Postprint Access?

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 20:16:26 +0000

SM: "Stevan asserts that researchers who cannot afford access to the published version of articles are perfectly happy with the self-archived author's final version.

"Interestingly, in our survey of learned society members Sue Thorn and I found that most of our 1368 respondents did not, in fact, use authors' self-archived versions even when they had no access to the published version - 53% never did so, and only 16% did so whenever possible."
Sally does not always put her survey questions in the most transparent way.

If you really want to find out whether or not researchers are "happy" with the author's refereed, accepted final draft when they lack access to the published version you have to ask them that:

(1) "How often do you encounter online, in a search or otherwise, the author's free refereed, accepted final draft of a potentially relevant article to which you (or your institution) cannot afford paid full-text access?"

(2) "If you lack access to the published version of such a potentially relevant article, would you prefer to have no access at all, or access to the author's free refereed, accepted final draft?"

(3) "If you would prefer access to the author draft over no access at all, how strongly would you prefer it over no access at all?

That's the forthright, transparent way to put the exact contingencies we are addressing. No equivocation or ambiguity.

In contrast, I am sure that Sally's question about "How often do you use author drafts?" was just that: "How often do you use author drafts?" Not "How often do you encounter a potentially relevant article, but decline to use it because you only have access to the author draft and not the published version?"

Sally's responses -- which seem to say that 47% do use the author draft and 53% do not use the author draft -- fail to reveal whether the 53% who fail to use the author draft indeed fail to do so because, even though they have found a potentially relevant author draft free online, and lack access to the publisher draft, they prefer to ignore the potentially relevant author draft (this would be very interesting and relevant news if it were indeed true), or simply because they happen to be among the 53% who had never encountered a potentially relevant author draft free online when they had no access to the publisher version. (And could the 16% who did use the author draft "wherever possible" perhaps correspond to the well-known datum that only about 15% of all articles have freely accessible author drafts online)?

Surveys that obscure these fundamental details under a cloud of ambiguity are not revealing researchers' preferences but their own.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Log Ratios, Effect Size, and a Mandated OA Advantage?

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 19:36:15 +0000

Update Feb 8, 2010: See also "Open Access: Self-Selected, Mandated & Random; Answers & Questions"

Phil Davis: "An interesting bit of research, although I have some methodological concerns about how you treat the data, which may explain some inconsistent and counter-intuitive results, see: http://j.mp/8LK57u A technical response addressing the methodology is welcome."

Thanks for the feedback. We reply to the three points of substance, in order of importance:

(1) LOG RATIOS: We analyzed log citation ratios to adjust for departures from normality. Logs were used to normalize the citations and attenuate distortion from high values. Moed's (2007) point was about (non-log) ratios that were not used in this study. We used log citation ratios. This approach loses some values when the log tranformation makes the denominator zero, but despite these lost data, the t-test results were significant, and were further confirmed by our second, logistic regression analysis. It is highly unlikely that any of this would introduce a systematic bias in favor of OA, but if the referees of the paper should call for a "simpler and more elegant" analysis to make sure, we will be glad to perform it.

(2) EFFECT SIZE: The size of the OA Advantage varies greatly from year to year and field to field. We reported this in Hajjem et al (2005), stressing that the important point is that there is virtually always a positive OA Advantage, absent only when the sample is too small or the effect is measured too early (as in Davis et al's 2008 study). The consistently bigger OA Advantage in physics (Brody & Harnad 2004) is almost certainly an effect of the Early Access factor, because in physics, unlike in most other disciplines (apart from computer science and economics), authors tend to make their unrefereed preprints OA well before publication. (This too might be a good practice to emulate, for authors desirous of greater research impact.)

(3) MANDATED OA ADVANTAGE? Yes, the fact that the citation advantage of mandated OA was slightly greater than that of self-selected OA is surprising, and if it proves reliable, it is interesting and worthy of interpretation. We did not interpret it in our paper, because it was the smallest effect, and our focus was on testing the Self-Selection/Quality-Bias hypothesis, according to which mandated OA should have little or no citation advantage at all, if self-selection is a major contributor to the OA citation advantage.

Our sample was 2002-2006. We are now analyzing 2007-2008. If there is still a statistically significant OA advantage for mandated OA over self-selected OA in this more recent sample too, a potential explanation is the inverse of the Self-Selection/Quality-Bias hypothesis (which, by the way, we do think is one of the several factors that contribute to the OA Advantage, alongside the other contributors: Early Advantage, Quality Advantage, Competitive Advantage, Download Advantage, Arxiv Advantage, and probably others).

The Self-Selection/Quality-Bias (SSQB) consists of better authors being more likely to make their papers OA, and/or authors being more likely to make their better papers OA, because they are better, hence more citeable. The hypothesis we tested was that all or most of the widely reported OA Advantage across all fields and years is just due to SSQB. Our data show that it is not, because the OA Advantage is no smaller when it is mandated. If it turns out to be reliably bigger, the most likely explanation is a variant of the "Sitting Pretty" (SP) effect, whereby some of the more comfortable authors have said that the reason they do not make their articles OA is that they think they have enough access and impact already. Such authors do not self-archive spontaneously. But when OA is mandated, their papers reap the extra benefit of OA, with its Quality Advantage (for the better, more citeable papers). In other words, if SSQB is a bias in favor of OA on the part of some of the better authors, mandates reverse an SP bias against OA on the part of others of the better authors. Spontaneous, unmandated OA would be missing the papers of these SP authors.

There may be other explanations too. But we think any explanation at all is premature until it is confirmed that this new mandated OA advantage is indeed reliable and replicable. Phil further singles out the fact that the mandate advantage is present in the middle citation ranges and not the top and bottom. Again, it seems premature to interpret these minor effects whose unreliability is unknown, but if forced to pick an interpretation now, we would say it was because the "Sitting Pretty" authors may be the middle-range authors rather than the top ones...

Yassine Gargouri, Chawki Hajjem, Vincent Lariviere, Yves Gingras, Les Carr, Tim Brody, Stevan Harnad

Brody, T. and Harnad, S. (2004) Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals. D-Lib Magazine 10(6).

Davis, P.M., Lewenstein, B.V., Simon, D.H., Booth, J.G., Connolly, M.J.L. (2008) Open access publishing, article downloads, and citations: randomised controlled trial British Medical Journal 337:a568

Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Gingras, Y. (2005) Ten-Year Cross-Disciplinary Comparison of the Growth of Open Access and How it Increases Research Citation Impact. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 28(4) 39-47.

Moed, H. F. (2006) The effect of 'Open Access' upon citation impact: An analysis of ArXiv's Condensed Matter Section Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58(13) 2145-2156

On Proportion and Strategy: OA, Non-OA, Gold-OA, Paid-OA

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 16:29:09 +0100

As I do not have exact figures on most of the 12 proportions I highlight below, I am expressing them only in terms of "vast majority" (75% or higher) vs. "minority" (25% or lower) -- rough figures that we can be confident are approximately valid. They turn out to have at least one rather important implication about practical priorities for institutions and funders who wish to provide Open Access to their research output.

TWELVE OA STATISTICS AND THREE CONCLUSIONS

#1: The vast majority of current (peer-reviewed) journal articles are not OA (Open Access) (neither Green OA nor Gold OA ).

A peer-reviewed journal article is Green OA if it has been made OA by its author, by self-archiving it in an Open Access Repository (preferably the author's own institution's OAI-compliant Institutional Repository) from which anyone can access it for free on the web.

A peer-reviewed journal article is Gold OA if it has been published in a Gold OA journal from which anyone can access it for free on the web.

There are at least 25,000 peer-reviewed journals, across all fields worldwide, publishing about 2.5 million articles per year.

#2: The vast majority of journals are not Gold OA.

(Note that the c. 10,000 journals indexed in SHERPA/Romeo do not include most of the Gold OA journals, although these would all be classed as Green too, as all Gold OA journals also endorse Green OA self-archiving. Romeo does, however, index just about all of the top journals in just about every field.)

#3: The vast majority of journals are Green OA.

Of the 10,000+ journals whose OA policies are indexed in SHERPA/Romeo, over 90% endorse immediate deposit and immediate OA by the author: 63% for the author's peer-reviewed final draft (the postprint) and a further 32% for the pre-refereeing preprint.

#4:   The vast majority of citations are to the top minority of articles (the Pareto/Seglen 90/10 rule).

#5:   The vast majority of journals (or journal articles) are not among the top minority of journals (or journal articles).

#6:   The vast majority of the top journals are not Gold OA.

#7:   The vast majority of the top journals are Green OA.

The relation between point #1 (the vast majority of articles are neither Green OA nor Gold OA) and point #7 (the vast majority of the top journals -- and indeed also the vast majority of all journals -- are Green OA) is this: Although the vast majority of journals endorse Green OA self-archiving by the author (and are hence Green) the vast majority of authors do not yet act upon this Green light to deposit. That is why the Green OA mandates by institutions and funders are needed.

#8: The vast majority of article authors would comply willingly with a Green OA mandate from their institutions and/or funders.

Ninety-five percent (95%) of authors surveyed (by Alma Swan of Key Perspectives, for JISC), in all fields and all countries, have stated that they would comply with a mandate to self-archive from their universities and/or their funders (over 80% of them say they would do it willingly). However, the vast majority do not self-archive spontaneously, without a mandate.

#9: The vast majority of institutions and funders do not yet mandate Green OA.

There are somewhere around 10,000 universities and research institutions worldwide. So far, 51 of them -- plus 36 research funders -- have mandated (i.e. required) their peer-reviewed research output to be made Green OA by depositing it in an OA repository.

#10:   The vast majority of Gold OA journals are not paid-publication journals.

#11:   The vast majority of the top Gold OA journals are paid-publication journals.

#12:   The vast majority of institutions do not have the funds to subscribe to all the journals their users need.
Because of the serials crisis, institutional library acquisitions budgets are overstretched. The same is true of research funders' budgets.

I think two strong conclusions follow from this:
C1: The fact that the vast majority of Gold OA journals are not paid-publication journals is not relevant if we are concerned about providing OA to the articles in the top journals.

C2: Green OA, mandated by institutions and funders, is the vastly underutilized means of providing OA.

The implication is:
It is vastly more productive (of OA) for universities and funders to mandate Green OA than to fund Gold OA.
(Whether institutions and funders elect to fund Gold OA after they have mandated Green OA is of course an entirely different question, and not a matter of urgency one way or the other. These statistics and conclusions about practical priority are intended only to illustrate the short-sightedness of funding Gold OA pre-emptively, without mandating Green OA, if the goal of institutions and funders is to provide Open Access to their research output.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Perils of Press-Release Journalism: NSF, U. Chicago, and Chronicle of Higher Education

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 22:43:15 +0000

Update Jan 1, 2010: See Gargouri, Y; C Hajjem, V Larivière, Y Gingras, L Carr,T Brody & S Harnad (2010) Open Access, Whether Self-Selected or Mandated, Increases Citation Impact, Especially for Higher Quality Research
Update Feb 8, 2010: See also "Open Access: Self-Selected, Mandated & Random; Answers & Questions"
In response to my critique of his Chronicle of Higher Education posting on Evans and Reimer's (2009) Science article (which I likewise critiqued, though much more mildly), I got an email from Paul Basken asking me to explain what, if anything, he had got wrong, since his posting was based entirely on a press release from NSF (which turns out to be a relay of a press release from the University of Chicago, E & R's home institution). Sure enough, the silly spin originated from the NSF/Chicago Press release (though the buck stops with E & R's own vague and somewhat tendentious description and interpretation of some of their findings). Here is the NSF/Chicago Press Release, enhanced with my comments, for your delectation and verdict:
NSF/U.CHICAGO:
"If you offer something of value to people for free while someone else charges a hefty sum of money for the same type of product, one would logically assume that most people would choose the free option. According to new research in today's edition of the journal Science, if the product in question is access to scholarly papers and research, that logic might just be wrong. These findings provide new insight into the nature of scholarly discourse and the future of the open source publication movement [sic, emphasis added]."
(1) If you offer something valuable for free, people will choose the free option unless they've already paid for the paid option (especially if they needed -- and could afford -- it earlier).

(2) Free access after an embargo of a year or more is not the same "something" as immediate free access. Its "value" for a potential user is lower. (That's one of the reasons institutions keep paying for subscription/license access to journals.)

(3) Hence it is not in the least surprising that immediate (paid) print-on-paper access + online access (IP + IO) generates more citations than immediate (paid) print-on-paper access (IP) alone.

(4) Nor is it surprising that immediate (paid) print-on-paper access + online access + delayed free online access (IP +IO + DF) generates more citations than just immediate (paid) print-on-paper + online access (IP + IO) alone -- even if the free access is provided a year or longer after the paid access.

(5) Why on earth would anyone conclude that the fact that the increase in citations from IP to IP + IO is 12% and the increase in citations from IP + IO to IP + IO + DF is a further 8% implies anything whatsoever about people's preference for paid access over free access? Especially when the free access is not even immediate (IF) but delayed (DF) and the 8% is an underestimate based on averaging in ancient articles: see E & R's supplemental Figure S1(c), right [with thanks to Mike Eisen for spotting this one!].
NSF/U.CHICAGO:
"Most research is published in scientific journals and reviews, and subscriptions to these outlets have traditionally cost money--in some cases a great deal of money. Publishers must cover the costs of producing peer-reviewed publications and in most cases also try to turn a profit. To access these publications, other scholars and researchers must either be able to afford subscriptions or work at institutions that can provide access.

"In recent years, as the Internet has helped lower the cost of publishing, more and more scientists have begun publishing their research in open source [sic] outlets online. Since these publications are free to anyone with an Internet connection, the belief has been that more interested readers will find them and potentially cite them. Earlier studies had postulated that being in an open source [sic] format could more than double the number of times a journal article is used by other researchers."
What on earth is an "open source outlet"? ("Open source" is a software matter.) Let's assume what's meant is "open access"; but then is this referring to (i) publishing in an open access journal, to (ii) publishing in a subscription journal but also self-archiving the published article to make it open access, or to (iii) self-archiving an unpublished paper?

What (many) previous studies had measured (not "postulated") was that authors (ii) publishing in a subscription journal (IP + IO) and also self-archiving their published article to make it Open Access (IP + IO + OA) could more than double their citations, compared to IP + IO alone. NSF/U.CHICAGO:
"To test this theory, James A. Evans, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, and Jacob Reimer, a student of neurobiology also at the University of Chicago, analyzed millions of articles available online, including those from open source publications [sic] and those that required payment to access."
No, Evans & Reimer (E & R) did nothing of the sort; and no "theory" was tested (nor was there any theory).

E & R only analyzed articles from subscription access journals before and after the journals made them accessible online (to paid subscribers only) (i.e., IP vs IP + IO) as well as before and after the journals made the online version accessible free for all (after a paid-access-only embargo of up to a year or more: i.e., IP +IO vs IP + IO + DF). E & R's methodology was based on comparing citation counts for articles within the same journals before and after being made free online (by the journal) following delays of various lengths. NSF/U.CHICAGO:
"The results were surprising. On average, when a given publication was made available online after being in print for a year, being published in an open source format [sic] increased the use of that article by about 8 percent. When articles are made available online in a commercial format a year after publication, however, usage increases by about 12 percent."
In other words, the citation count increase from just (paid) IP to (paid) IP + IO was 12% and the citation count increase from just (paid) IP + IO to (paid) IP + IO + DF was a further 8%. Not in the least surprising: Making paid-access articles accessible online increases their citations, and making them free online (even if only after a delay of a year or longer) increases their citations still more.

What is surprising is the rather absurd spin that this press release appears to be trying to put on this decidedly unsurprising finding.
NSF/U.CHICAGO:
"'Across the scientific community,' Evans said in an interview, 'it turns out that open access does have a positive impact on the attention that's given to the journal articles, but it's a small impact.'"
We already knew that OA increased citations, as the many prior published studies have shown. Most of those studies, however, were based on immediate OA (i.e., IF), not embargoed OA. What E & R do show, interestingly, is that even delaying OA for a year or more still increases citations, though (unsurprisingly) not as much as immediate OA (IF) does.
NSF/U.CHICAGO:
"Yet Evans and Reimer's research also points to one very positive impact of the open source movement [sic] that is sometimes overlooked in the debate about scholarly publications. Researchers in the developing world, where research funding and libraries are not as robust as they are in wealthier countries, were far more likely to read and cite open source articles."
A large portion of the citation increase from (delayed) OA turns out to come from Developing Countries (refuting Frandsen's recent report to the contrary). This is a new and useful finding (though hardly a surprising one, if one does the arithmetic). (A similar analysis, within the US, comparing citations from America's own "Have-Not" Universities (with the smaller journal subscription budgets) with its Harvards might well reveal the same effect closer to home, though probably at a smaller scale.)NSF/U.CHICAGO:
"The University of Chicago team concludes that outside the developed world, the open source movement [sic] 'widens the global circle of those who can participate in science and benefit from it.'"
And it will be interesting to test for the same effect comparing the Harvards and the Have-Nots in the US -- but a more realistic estimate might come from looking at immediate OA (IF) rather than just embargoed OA (DF). NSF/U.CHICAGO:
"So while some scientists and scholars may chose to pay for scientific publications even when free publications are available, their colleagues in other parts of the world may find that going with open source works [sic] is the only choice they have."
It would be interesting to hear the authors of this NSF/Chicago press release -- or E & R, for that matter -- explain how this paradoxical "preference" for paid access over free access was tested during the access embargo period...

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Learned Society Survey On Open Access Self-Archiving

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 02:57:22 +0000
On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 3:15 PM, Sally Morris [SM] (Morris Associates) wrote in liblicense:
SM:
"Sue Thorn and I will shortly be publishing a report of a research study on the attitudes and behaviour of 1368 members of UK-based learned societies in the life sciences.

"72.5% said they never used self-archived articles when they had access to the published version"
This makes sense. The self-archived versions are supplements, for those who don't have subscription access.
SM:
"3% did so whenever possible, 10% sometimes and 14% rarely. When they did not have access to the published version, 53% still never accessed the self-archived version"
This is an odd category: Wouldn't one have to know what percentage of those articles -- to which these respondents did not have subscription access -- in fact had self-archived versions at all? (The global baseline for spontaneous self-archiving is around 15%)

The way it is stated above, it sounds as if the respondents knew there was a self-archived version, but chose not to use it. I would strongly doubt that...
SM:
"16% did so whenever possible"
That 16% sounds awfully close to the baseline 15% where it is possible, because the self-archived supplement exists. In that case, the right description would be that 100%, not 16%, did so. (But I rather suspect the questions were yet again posed in such an ambiguous way that it is impossible to sort any of this out.)

SM:
"16% sometimes and 15% rarely. However, 13% of references were not in fact to self-archiving repositories - they included Athens, Ovid, Science Direct and ISI Web of Science/Web of Knowledge."
To get responses on self-archived content, you have to very carefully explain to your respondents what is and is not meant by self-archived content: Free online versions, not those you or your institution have to pay subscription tolls to access.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Suber/Harnad statement in support of the investigative work of Richard Poynder

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 23:59:15 +0100
Richard Poynder, a distinguished scientific journalist specializing in online-era scientific/scholarly communication and publication, has been the ablest, most prolific and most probing chronicler of the open access movement from its very beginning. He is widely respected for his independence, even-handedness, analysis, careful interviews, and detailed research.

Richard is currently conducting a series of investigations on the peer review practices of some newly formed open access journals and their publishers. In one case, when a publisher would not talk to him privately, Richard made his questions public in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:
"Help sought on OA publisher Scientific Journals International"
That posting elicited public and private threats of a libel suit and accusations of racism.
"Lies, fear and smear campaigns against SJI and other OA journals"
Those groundless threats and accusations appear to us to be attempts to intimidate. Moreover, Richard is being portrayed as an opponent of open access, which he is not. He is an even-handed, critically minded analyst of the open access movement (among other things), and his critical investigations are healthy for open access.

He has interviewed us both, at length. While the resulting pictures were largely favorable, he didn't hesitate to probe our weaknesses and the objections others have raised to our respective methods or styles of work. This kind of critical scrutiny is essential to a new and fast-growing movement and does not imply hostility to the subjects of his investigation or opposition to open access.

Trying to suppress Richard Poynder's investigations through threats of legal action is contemptible. We hope that the friends of open access in the legal community will attest to the lawfulness of his inquiries and that all friends of open access will attest to the value and legitimacy of his investigative journalism.

Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad

On Eggs and Citations

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 20:18:12 +0100

Update Jan 1, 2010: See Gargouri, Y; C Hajjem, V Larivière, Y Gingras, L Carr,T Brody & S Harnad (2010) Open Access, Whether Self-Selected or Mandated, Increases Citation Impact, Especially for Higher Quality Research
Update Feb 8, 2010: See also "Open Access: Self-Selected, Mandated & Random; Answers & Questions"
Failing to observe a platypus laying eggs is not a demonstration that the platypus does not lay eggs.

You have to actually observe the provenance, ab ovo, of those little newborn platypusses, if you want to demonstrate that they are not being engendered by egg-laying.

Failing to observe a significant OA citation Advantage within a year of publication (or a year and a half -- or longer, as the case may be) with randomized OA does not demonstrate that the many studies that do observe a significant OA citation Advantage with nonrandomized OA are simply reporting self-selection artifacts (i.e., selective provision of OA for the more highly citable articles.)

To demonstrate the latter, you first have to replicate the OA citation Advantage with nonrandomized OA (on the same or comparable sample) and then demonstrate that randomized OA (on the same or comparable sample) eliminates that OA citation Advantage (on the same or comparable sample).

Otherwise, you are simply comparing apples and oranges (or eggs and expectations, as the case may be) in reporting a failure to observe a significant OA citation Advantage in a first-year (or first 1.5-year) sample with randomized OA -- along with a failure to observe a significant OA citation Advantage for nonrandomized OA either, for the same sample (on the grounds that the nonrandomized OA subsample was too small):

The many reports of the nonrandomized OA Citation Advantage are based on samples that were sufficiently large, and on a sufficiently long time-scale (almost never as short as a year) to detect a significant OA Citation Advantage.

A failure to observe a significant effect with small, early samples, on short time-scales -- whether randomized or nonrandomized -- is simple that: a failure to observe a significant effect: Keep testing till the size and duration of your sample of randomized and nonrandomized OA is big enough to test your self-selection hypothesis (i.e., comparable with the other studies that have detected the effect).

Meanwhile, note that (as other studies have likewise found), although a year proved too short to observe a significant OA citation Advantage for randomized (or nonrandomized) OA, it did prove long enough to observe a significant OA download Advantage for randomized OA -- and that other studies have also reported that early download advantages correlate significantly with later significant citation advantages.

Just as mating more is likely to lead to more progeny for platypusses (by whatever route) than mating less, so accessing and downloading more is likely to lead to more citations for papers than accessing and downloading less.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum