On Mon, 3 Oct 2005, Thomas Krichel wrote:
> But Wren notes that a large number of the open access does not come from
> authors uploading them, but readers uploading them to share with others,
> but forgetting that they are then in open access. Thus, the correlation
> between high impact and open access maybe due to high impact articles
> beinng more widely read and incidently left on servers.
>
> Wren's trophy effect may be entirely due to that "journal club" effect.
> Without a manual look at his data, it is hard to tell.
This explanation does not work, for example, for the results we have for Arxiv,
which has no 3rd-party archiving:
http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/
Since we find exactly the same pattern for the web-wide studies, it is unlikely
that the underlying causes are very different:
http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/graphes/EtudeImpact.htm
There are no doubt several factors contributing to the OA advantage,
Quality Bias (QB) (mostly from authors' preferential self-archiving
of their own higher-quality papers, but possibly also from 3rd-party
archiving of same) being one of the contributing factors. But it is
certainly not the only factor, and becomes a less and less plausible
hypothesis as the percentage of self-archiving in a field rises.
"OA Impact Advantage = EA + (AA) + (QB) + QA + (CA) + UA"
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/29-guid.html
Stevan Harnad
Received on Tue Oct 04 2005 - 04:23:05 BST