OA advantage = EA + (AA) + (QB) + QA + (CA) + UA

[Stevan Harnad]

    Prior AmSci Topic Thread:
    OA advantage = EA + AA + QB + OA + UA
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3977.html

Ian Rowland's observations, below, are spot-on. He is exactly right that
the OA impact advantage (currently 50-250%) will shrink as we approach
100% OA. Right now we are at 15% OA, and the advantage is in part --
no one can say how large a part -- a *competitive* advantage of the minority
15% OA -- the head-start vanguard -- over the laggard 85% non-OA majority.

That makes it partly a race; and clearly, the race is to the swift and
the battle to the strong. The competitive advantage is *more* reason for an
individual, institution or nation (like the UK) to self-archive right now
(as the RCUK will, we hope, soon be doing).

    http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/28-guid.html

The OA impact advantage consists of at least the following 6 factors,
three of them (2,3,5) temporary (), three of them permanent (1,4,6)**:

    1. *EA*: EARLY ADVANTAGE, beginning already at the pre-refereeing
    preprint stage. Research that is reported earlier not only gets its
    quota of citations sooner, but the quota goes up, permanently. This
    is probably because earlier uptake has a greater cumulative effect
    on the research cycle.

    2. (AA): (ARXIV ADVANTAGE) the special advantage of self-archiving
    specifically in Arxiv for physicists, because it is a central
    point of call: OAI-interoperable Institutional Repositories will
    supersede this, I am certain, and it will make zero difference which
    OAI-compliant IR one deposits in.

    3. (QB): (QUALITY BIAS) from self-selection; noncausal: The
    higher-quality articles/authors are somewhat more likely to
    self-archive in these early (15%) days of self-archiving: this too
    will disappear self-archiving approaches 100%, of course).

    4. *QA*: QUALITY ADVANTAGE, allowing the high-quality articles to
    compete on a level playing field, not handicapped by access
    affordability. A permanent effect.

    5. (CA): COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE, for self-archived papers over
    non-self-archived ones, in early (15%) days; this will disappear
    once once self-archiving nears 100%, of course, but it is an optimal
    extra motivator right now, for the low % self-archiving fields.

    6. *UA*: USAGE ADVANTAGE: More downloads for OA articles. This too
    is a permanent effect.

Of these, only EA, QA, and UA are operative in the few fields that are
already close to 100% OA, such as astrophysics and High Energy Physics.
    http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/
But everywhere else we are concerned with getting the 15% fields to
climb to 100%, and for them the CA matters a lot too.
    http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/graphes/EtudeImpact.htm

So I basically agree with Ian Rowland's comment, and have only two small
replies to add below:

On Thu, 15 Sep 2005 ir at soi.city.ac.uk wrote:

> The flow of your logic is that open access increases the chances of an article
> being downloaded and read, and hence a greater probability that it will be
> cited, all things being equal.  That's fine as a point of departure.
>
> If I am the first author to publish an open access article in an almost wholly
> toll access environment, I can see that I would have an enormous comparative
> advantage over the rest of my colleagues and might well expect to accrue
> additional citations.  Similarly the first research group or even nation to see
> the light would have a great advantage.
>
> If, however, I am the one millionth author (or the 10,000th research group or
> the 100th nation) to publish open access, that comparative advantage must
> quickly decline, approaching zero as the last few laggards pile in: there would
> be a completely level playing field.  This is not an argument against open
> access but it is a logical consequence of the mass migration to that particular
> form of publishing in terms of citation advantage.

Exactly: The race is to the swift and the battle to the strong. And if
the RCUK adopts its proposed mandate, this will give the UK a substantial
competitive advantage. Once other nations follow suit (as it is to be
hoped that they will do), the competitive advantage will shrink, but the
the Early Advantage, Quality Advantage and Usage Advantage will remain,
and all of research worldwide will be the better off for it.

> Meanwhile, the measurement tools (and I'm thinking here specifically of ISI as
> an example) remain constant.  The only way for us all to get higher citation
> counts within this frame of reference is EITHER for ISI to expand its coverage
> to include more sources OR for ISI-indexed journal editors to reject fewer
> papers or for authors to compile longer reference lists.  I can't see the latter
> happening.

ISI will almost certainly expand. But there are other players on the
field now too, including free ones, such as citebase, citeseer and google
scholar, and paid ones, such as scopus. So there plenty of new ways to
measure and compare the increased citations that come from OA:

http://citebase.eprints.org/
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/
http://scholar.google.com/
http://www.scopus.com/

> If open access became near universal, all that would happen within the current
> measurement regime is that we'd still all get the same number of citations,
> they'd just be from open access rather than tolled sources.  The logic of your
> press release is fine, it's just there's an imminent sell by date before the
> magic works off.

The Competitive Advantage would be gone, but the Early Advantage,
Quality Advantage and Usage Advantage would be going strong. Michael
Kurtz has shown that although articles in a 100% OA field (astrophysics)
do not have longer reference lists, hence do not cite more articles,
they do have three times higher usage rates (UA).

    http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html

And of course the composition of the references can now be determined by
the merit and quality of the article (QA), not just the affordability
of the journal in which it happened to be published. And whereas the
competitive horse-race (for who self-archives to gain the CA first)
will be over, the cognitive horse-race (for who finds what earlier: EA)
will continue to favour the swift and the strong.

It is fair to say, though, that if the annual 1.5 billion pounds-pounds
worth of potential impact that the UK is currently losing because it only
self-archives 15% of its research output will shrink as other nations'
self-archiving policies catch up. How much it shrinks will then depend
on the true merit of British research and not just the UK's head-start
in self-archiving.

Stevan Harnad

> >  From: Stevan Harnad <harnad at ECS.SOTON.AC.UK>
> >  Subject: Maximising the Return on UK's Public Investment in Research
> >  To: SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU
> >
> > Press Release: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/news/792
> >         Maximising the Return on UK's Public Investment in Research
> > Full text: http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/28-guid.html