Early citation advantage?

[Stevan Harnad]

On Wed, 21 Jun 2006, Stephen J Bensman wrote:

> I am totally confused as to what you mean by "gold" versus "green" OA
> journals.

GOLD road to OA: publish in an OA journal.
GREEN road to OA: Publish in a NOA journal and self-archive your article:

GOLD journals (9%)
GREEN journals (includes GOLD journals as subset) (94%), give authors "green light"
to self-archive immediately.
GREY journals do not yet give authors the green light to self-archive immediately.

    http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php
    http://www.doaj.org/

    Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S.,
    Gingras, Y., Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H. and Hilf, E. (2004)
    The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus.
    http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html

> There have always problems with the immediacy index due to differences in
> frequency of publication.

That's nothing compared to the problem of equating apples and oranges (GOLD and
GREEN and GREY). For more rigorous to compare *within* journals rather than
between.

Stevan Harnad