Self-selected or mandated, open access increases citation impact for higher quality research

Articles whose authors make them Open Access (OA) by self-archiving them online are cited significantly more than articles accessible only to subscribers. Some have suggested that this "OA Advantage" may not be causal but just a self-selection bias, because authors preferentially make higher-quality articles OA. To test this we compared self-selective self-archiving with mandatory self-archiving for a sample of 27,197 articles published 2002-2006 in 1,984 journals. The OA Advantage proved just as high for both. Logistic regression showed that the advantage is independent of other correlates of citations (article age; journal impact factor; number of co-authors, references or pages; field; article type; country or institution) and greatest for the most highly cited articles. The OA Advantage is real, independent and causal, but skewed. Its size is indeed correlated with quality, just as citations themselves are (the top 20% of articles receive about 80% of all citations). The advantage is greater for the more citeable articles, not because of a quality bias from authors self-selecting what to make OA, but because of a quality advantage, from users self-selecting what to use and cite, freed by OA from the constraints of selective accessibility to subscribers only. [See accompanying RTF file for responses to feedback. Four PDF files provide Supplementary Analysis.

Testing the Finch Hypothesis on Green OA Mandate Ineffectiveness

We have now tested the Finch Committee's Hypothesis that Green Open Access Mandates are ineffective in generating deposits in institutional repositories. With data from ROARMAP on institutional Green OA mandates and data from ROAR on institutional repositories, we show that deposit number and rate is significantly correlated with mandate strength (classified as 1-12): The stronger the mandate, the more the deposits. The strongest mandates generate deposit rates of 70%+ within 2 years of adoption, compared to the un-mandated deposit rate of 20%. The effect is already detectable at the national level, where the UK, which has the largest proportion of Green OA mandates, has a national OA rate of 35%, compared to the global baseline of 25%. The conclusion is that, contrary to the Finch Hypothesis, Green Open Access Mandates do have a major effect, and the stronger the mandate, the stronger the effect (the Liege ID/OA mandate, linked to research performance evaluation, being the strongest mandate model). RCUK (as well as all universities, research institutions and research funders worldwide) would be well advised to adopt the strongest Green OA mandates and to integrate institutional and funder mandates.Comment: 6 pages, 1 table, 4 figure

Harnad Comments on Canada’s NSERC/SSHRC/CIHR Draft Tri-Agency Open Access Policy

The Draft Canadian Draft Tri-Agency Open Access Policy is excellent in preserving fundees’ free choice of journal, and afree choice about whether or not to use the research funds to pay to publish in an OA journal. However, deposit in the fundee’s institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication needs to be required, whether or not the fundee chooses to publish in an OA journal and whether or not access to the deposit is embargoed for 12 months. This makes it possible for the fundee’s institution to monitor and ensure timely compliance with the funder OA policy and it also facilitates providing individual eprints by the fundee to individual eprint requestors for research purposes during any embargo. Institutional repository deposits can then be automatically exported to any institutional-external repositories the fundee, funding agency or institution wishes. On no account should compliance with funding agency conditions be left to the publisher rather than the fundee and the fundee’s institution

Green and Gold Open Access Percentages and Growth, by Discipline

Most refereed journal articles today are published in subscription journals, accessible only to subscribing institutions, hence losing considerable research impact. Making articles freely accessible online ("Open Access," OA) maximizes their impact. Articles can be made OA in two ways: by self-archiving them on the web ("Green OA") or by publishing them in OA journals ("Gold OA"). We compared the percent and growth rate of Green and Gold OA for 14 disciplines in two random samples of 1300 articles per discipline out of the 12,500 journals indexed by Thomson-Reuters-ISI using a robot that trawled the web for OA full-texts. We sampled in 2009 and 2011 for publication year ranges 1998-2006 and 2005-2010, respectively. Green OA (21.4%) exceeds Gold OA (2.4%) in proportion and growth rate in all but the biomedical disciplines, probably because it can be provided for all journals articles and does not require paying extra Gold OA publication fees. The spontaneous overall OA growth rate is still very slow (about 1% per year). If institutions make Green OA self-archiving mandatory, however, it triples percent Green OA as well as accelerating its growth rate

Citation Counts and Evaluation of Researchers in the Internet Age

Bibliometric measures derived from citation counts are increasingly being used as a research evaluation tool. Their strengths and weaknesses have been widely analyzed in the literature and are often subject of vigorous debate. We believe there are a few fundamental issues related to the impact of the web that are not taken into account with the importance they deserve. We focus on evaluation of researchers, but several of our arguments may be applied also to evaluation of research institutions as well as of journals and conferences.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, 3 table

Open Access guidelines for the arts and humanities: Recommendations by the DARIAH European research infrastructure consortium

In the DARIAH Open Access guidelines we propose recommendations to improve Open Access to publications in the arts and humanities. Our core aim is to bring closer the harmonized but transforming European Open Access policy landscape to the communities around DARIAH and recommend very practical steps to achieve compliance with it.In the DARIAH Open Access guidelines we propose recommendations to improve Open Access to publications in the arts and humanities. Our core aim is to bring closer the harmonized but transforming European Open Access policy landscape to the communities around DARIAH and recommend very practical steps to achieve compliance with it

Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving

Universal Open Access (OA) is fully within the reach of the global research community: Research institutions and funders need merely mandate (green) OA self-archiving of the final, refereed drafts of all journal articles immediately upon acceptance for publication. The money to pay for gold OA publishing will only become available if universal green OA eventually makes subscriptions unsustainable. Paying for gold OA pre-emptively today, without first having mandated green OA not only squanders scarce money, but it delays the attainment of universal OA

It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint: Launching and Sustaining the Momentum for Open Access Journals

While starting an open access journal can lead to exciting new venues for scholarship, the initial enthusiasm of a journal’s founders can wane when faced with the daunting task of keeping the momentum going after the first issue is launched. Even with a steady source of funding from a scholarly society or institution, many factors can play into the demise of an OA publication. A journal requires an active editorial board, a pool of reliable reviewers and copy editors, and the ability to attract authors with high-quality content. Furthermore, a journal must also continuously attract readers who will then cite articles published in the journal. In order to do this, a journal must be disseminated to the appropriate audience, which means indexing in directories and databases, search engine optimization, and networking with organizations that can help publicize new issues. How well the editorial staff manages these many considerations can be the difference between a publishing endeavor that flourishes and one that does not. This presentation will address the potential challenges of launching an OA journal and provide strategies for maintaining a viable publication on a long-term basis. Examples of both successful and unsuccessful OA journals will be used to demonstrate best practices and pitfalls of open access publishing