Travis Metcalfe says OA advantage not self-selection (fwd)

[David Goodman]

Unfortunately the article is not OA. Perhaps the author can post his 
manuscript. I cannot tell, for example, if notification advantage 
was considered for the conference papers. 

Research articles about OA should not be published in places 
where some form of OA is not available. We say, and rightly, that 
there should be almost no instance of not being able to find a 
suitable journal that permits self-archiving.

David Goodman, Ph.D., M.L.S.
previously:
Bibliographer and Research Librarian
Princeton University Library

dgoodman at princeton.edu


----- Original Message -----
From: Stevan Harnad <harnad at ECS.SOTON.AC.UK>
Date: Wednesday, December 20, 2006 11:47 am
Subject: [SIGMETRICS] Travis Metcalfe says OA advantage not self-selection (fwd)
To: SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU

> Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe):
> http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html
> 
> Mike Kurtz has just forwarded the URL for a recent paper by Travis 
> Metcalfeconfirming that the OA impact advantage is not merely a 
> self-selection
> effect in astrophysics:
> 
>    ----
>    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
>    ----
> 
> 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 
> collectedand 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-
> archivingadvantage 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 
> overand above the citation advantages conferred by articles age, 
> journalimpact factor, and number of authors. Details in another 
> forthcomingposting.)
> 
> 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
>