Re: Craig et al.'s review of the OA citation advantage

From: <bernd-christoph.kaemper_at_ub.uni-stuttgart.de>
Date: Sat, 26 May 2007 17:49:07 -0400

On Sat, 26 May 2007, Stevan Harnad wrote:

> >
> > Due to the multitude of possible confounding factors I would not
> > believe any of the figures calculated by Stevan Harnad as the
> > cumulated lost impact, or conversely, the possible gain.
>
> I couldn't quite follow the logic of this posting. It seemed to be
> saying that, yes, there is evidence that OA increases impact, it is
> eventrivially obvious, but, no, we cannot estimate how much,
> because there
> are possible confounding factors and the size of the increase varies.

Could we do a thought experiment?
 From a representative group of authors, choose a sample of authors
randomly and induce them to make their next article open access.
Do you believe they will see as much gain in citations compared to
their previous average citation levels as predicted from the various
current "OA advantage" studies where several confounding factors
are operating? Probably not - but what would remain of that
advantage? -- I find that difficult to predict or model.

As I learned from your posting, you seem to predict that it will
anyway depend on the previous citedness of the members of that
group (if we take that as a proxy for the unknown actual intrinsic
citation value of those articles), in the sense that more-cited authors
will see a larger percentage increase effect.

To turn your argument around, most authors happily going open
access in expectation of increased citation might be disappointed
because the 50% increase will only apply to a small minority of
them. That was the reason why I said that (as an individual author)
I would rather not believe in any "promised" values for the possible
gain. That doesn't mean though that there are not enough other
reasons to go for open access (I mentioned many of them in my
posting).

With respect to the toll accessibility index, I completely agree.
The occasional good article in an otherwise "obscure" journal
probably has a lot to gain from open access, as many people
would not bother to try to get hold of a copy should they find it
among a lot of others in a bibliographic database search, if it
doesn't look from the beginning like a "perfect match" of what
they are looking for.

An interesting question to look at would also be the effect of
open access on non-formal citation modes like web linking,
especially social bookmarking. Clearly NPG is interested in
Connotea also as a means to enhance the visibility of articles
in their own toll access articles. Has anyone already tried such
investigations?

Bernd-Christoph Kaemper, Stuttgart University Library
Received on Sat May 26 2007 - 23:52:02 BST