Maximising the Return on UK's Public Investment in Research

[Stevan Harnad]

             ** Apologies for cross-posting **

Press Release: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/news/792

        Maximising the Return on UK's Public Investment in Research

        Stevan Harnad
        Moderator, American Scientist Open Access Forum
    http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html

        Professor of Cognitive Science
        Department of Electronics and Computer Science
        University of Southampton
        SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM

        Chaire de recherche du Canada
        Centre de neuroscience de la cognition (CNC)
        Université du Québec à Montréal
        Montréal, Québec,  Canada  H3C 3P8
        harnad at uqam.ca
        http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/

The United Kingdom is not yet maximising the return on its public investment  in
research.  Research Councils UK (RCUK) spend  £3.5 billion pounds annually. The UK
produces at least 130,000 research journal articles per year, but it is not the
number of articles published that reflects the return on the UK?s investment:  A
piece of research, if it is worth funding and doing at all, must be not only
published, but used, applied and built upon by other researchers. This is called
?research impact? and a measure of it is the number of times an article is cited
by other articles (?citation impact?).

But in order to be used and built upon, an article must first be accessed. A
published article is accessible only to those researchers who happen to be at
institutions that can afford to subscribe to the particular journal  in which it
was published. There are 24,000 journals  in all, and most institutions can only
afford a small fraction of them. In paper days, authors used to supplement this
paid access to their articles by mailing free reprints to any would-be users who
wrote to request them. The online age has made it possible to provide  free
?eprints? (electronic versions of the author?s draft) to all potential users who
cannot afford the journal version by ?self-archiving? them on the author?s own
institutional website.

The online-age practice of self-archiving has been shown to increase citation
impact by a dramatic 50-250%, but so far only 15% of researchers are doing it. A
recent UK international  survey has found that 95% of authors would self-archive ?
but only if their research funders or their institutions required them to do it
(just as they already require them to ?publish or perish?). The solution is hence
obvious:

After lengthy deliberations first initiated in 2003 by the UK Parliamentary Select
Committee on Science and Technology,  RCUK have proposed to adopt a policy
requiring UK researchers to deposit, on their university's website, the final
author's draft of any journal article resulting from RCUK-funded research. The
purpose of the proposed policy would be to maximise the usage and impact of UK
research findings by making them freely accessible on the web ("open access") for
any potential users in the UK and worldwide who cannot afford paid access to the
published journal version.  How does this maximise the return on the UK public
investment in research?

It is not possible to calculate all the ways in which research generates revenue.
A good deal of it is a question of probability and depends on time: Although
everyone thinks of an immediate cure for cancer or a cheap, clean source of energy
as the kind of result we hope for, most research progresses gradually and
indirectly, and the best estimate of the size and direction of its progress is its
citation impact, for that reflects the degree of uptake of research results by
other researchers, in their own subsequent research. Citation impact is
accordingly rewarded by universities (through salary increases and promotion) and
by research-funders like RCUK (through grant funding and renewal); it is also
rewarded by libraries (through journal selection and renewal, based on a journal's
average citation "impact factor"). Counting citations is a natural extension of
the cruder measure of research impact: counting publications themselves ("publish
or perish").

If citations are being counted, it is natural to ask how much they are worth.

The marginal dollar value of one citation was estimated by Diamond in 1986 to
range from $50-$1300 (US), depending on field and number of citations.  (An
increase from 0 to 1 citation is worth more than an increase from 30 to 31; most
articles are in the citation range 0-5.) If we convert from dollars to UK pounds
sterling (£27-£710) and update by 170% for inflation from 1986-2005, this yields
the range £46-$1207 as the marginal value of a UK citation today. Self-archiving,
as noted, increases citations by 50-250%, but, as also noted, only 15% of the
articles being published are being self-archived today.

We will now apply only the most conservative  ends of these estimates (50%
citation increase from self-archiving at £46 per citation) to the UK's current
annual journal article output (and only for the approximately 130,000 UK articles
a year indexed by the Institute for Scientific Information, which covers only the
top 8000 of the world's 24,000 journals). If we multiply by the 85% of the UK's
annual journal article output that is not yet self-archived (110, 500 articles),
this translates into an annual loss of £2, 541, 500 in revenue to UK researchers
for not having done (or delegated) the few extra keystrokes per article it would
have taken to self-archive their final drafts.

But this impact loss translates into a far bigger one for the British public, if
we reckon it as the loss of potential returns on its research investment. As a
proportion of the RCUK?s yearly £3.5bn research expenditure,  our conservative
estimate would be a 50% x 85% x £3.5.bn = £1.5bn worth of loss in potential
research impact. And that is without even considering the wider loss in revenue
from potential usage and applications of UK research findings in the UK and
worldwide,  nor the still more general loss to the progress of human inquiry.

The solution is obvious, and it is the one the RCUK is proposing: to extend the
existing universal 'publish or perish' requirement to 'publish and also
self-archive your final draft on your institutional website'.  Over 90% of
journals already endorse author self-archiving and the international author survey
-- plus the actual experience of the two institutions that have already adopted
such a requirement (CERN and University of Southampton ECS ) -- has shown that
over 90% of authors will comply.

The time to close this 50%-250% research impact gap is already well overdue. This
is the historic moment for the UK to set an example for the world , showing how to
maximise the return on the public investment in research in the online era.

How self-archiving increases citation impact:
http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html

How much a citation is worth:
http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v11p354y1988.pdf

How much time and effort is involved in self-archiving
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/

RCUK self-archiving policy proposal:
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/index.asp

Directory of publishers' policies on author self-archiving:
http://romeo.eprints.org/

JISC user survey on self-archiving:
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11006/