Whether Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research

[Philip Davis]

An interesting bit of research, although I have some methodological 
concerns about how you treat the data, which may explain some 
inconsistent and counter-intuitive results, see:

http://j.mp/8LK57u

A technical response addressing the methodology is welcome.

--Phil Davis



Stevan Harnad wrote:
> Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for
> Higher Quality Research
>
> http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.0361
>
> Yassine Gargouri, Chawki Hajjem, Vincent Lariviere, Yves Gingras, Les
> Carr, Tim Brody, Stevan Harnad
>
> ABSTRACT: Articles whose authors make them Open Access (OA) by
> self-archiving them online are cited significantly more than articles
> accessible only to subscribers. Some have suggested that this "OA
> Advantage" may not be causal but just a self-selection bias, because
> authors preferentially make higher-quality articles OA. To test this
> we compared self-selective self-archiving with mandatory
> self-archiving for a sample of 27,197 articles published 2002-2006 in
> 1,984 journals. The OA Advantage proved just as high for both.
> Logistic regression showed that the advantage is independent of other
> correlates of citations (article age; journal impact factor; number of
> co-authors, references or pages; field; article type; or country) and
> greatest for the most highly cited articles. The OA Advantage is real,
> independent and causal, but skewed. Its size is indeed correlated with
> quality, just as citations themselves are (the top 20% of articles
> receive about 80% of all citations). The advantage is greater for the
> more citeable articles, not because of a quality bias from authors
> self-selecting what to make OA, but because of a quality advantage,
> from users self-selecting what to use and cite, freed by OA from the
> constraints of selective accessibility to subscribers only.
>
> http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18346/
>
>   


-- 
Philip M. Davis
PhD Student
Department of Communication
301 Kennedy Hall
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853
email: pmd8 at cornell.edu
phone: 607 255-2124
https://confluence.cornell.edu/display/~pmd8/resume
http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/author/pmd8/