Mike Kurtz has just forwarded the URL for a recent paper by Travis Metcalfe
confirming that the OA impact advantage is not merely a self-selection
effect in astrophysics:
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Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2006 10:35:55 -0500
From: kurtz -- cfa.harvard.edu
To: harnad -- ecs.soton.ac.uk
You may want to look at:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006SoPh..239..549M
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I too will shortly be posting (in reply to Henk Moed)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#5901
a summary of some preliminary evidence across disciplines, just collected
and analyzed by my doctoral student, Chawki Hajjem, using our robot-search
methodology. Based on comparing the OA advantage for mandated and
non-mandated self-archiving, this too confirms that the OA self-archiving
advantage is not merely a self-selection effect.
For the desperately curious, the data are already visible here
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/moedrep.ppt
and they also include the analyses in response to Eysenbach's challenge
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#5373
to show, with independent multiple regression analyses, that the OA
self-archiving advantage from our multi-disciplinary, robot-based
comparisons is not merely an artifact "confounding" article age,
journal impact factor or number of authors. (Outcome: There is indeed a
statistically significant, independent OA self-archiving advantage over
and above the citation advantages conferred by articles age, journal
impact factor, and number of authors. Details in another forthcoming
posting.)
Here, meanwhile, is Metcalfe's abstract:
Metcalfe, Travis S. (2006) The Citation Impact of Digital Preprint
Archives for Solar Physics Papers. Solar Physics, Volume 239, Issue
1-2, pp. 549-553
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006SoPh..239..549M
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11207-006-0262-7
ABSTRACT: Papers that are posted to a digital preprint archive are
typically cited twice as often as papers that are not posted. This has
been demonstrated for papers published in a wide variety of journals,
and in many different subfields of astronomy. Most astronomers
now use the arXiv.org server (astro-ph) to distribute preprints,
but the solar physics community has an independent archive hosted
at Montana State University. For several samples of solar physics
papers published in 2003, I quantify the boost in citation rates for
preprints posted to each of these servers. I show that papers on the
MSU archive typically have citation rates 1.7 times higher than the
average of similar papers that are not posted as preprints, while
those posted to astro-ph get 2.6 times the average. A comparable
boost is found for papers published in conference proceedings,
suggesting that the higher citation rates are not the result of
self-selection of above-average papers.
Stevan Harnad
Received on Wed Dec 20 2006 - 16:59:17 GMT