Yet Another "OA" Study Comparing Apples and Fruit?

[Stevan Harnad]

Peterson, G. M. (2013). Characteristics of retracted open access biomedical
literature: A bibliographic analysis. *Journal of the American Society for
Information Science and Technology*, 64(12), 2428-2436.

*Abstract*: *The author analyzes retracted biomedical literature to
determine if open access and fee-for-access works differ in terms of the
practice and effectiveness of retraction. Citation and content analysis
were applied to articles grouped by accessibility (libre, gratis, and fee
for access) for various bibliometric attributes. Open access literature
does not differ from fee-for-access literature in terms of impact factor,
detection of error, or change in postretraction citation rates. Literature
found in the PubMed Central Open Access subset provides detailed
information about the nature of the anomaly more often than less accessible
works. Open access literature appears to be of similar reliability and
integrity as the population of biomedical literature in general, with the
added value of being more forthcoming about the nature of errors when they
are identified.*

I can't read the article because it wasn't OA -- but what was being
compared here<https://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&lr=&q=harnad%20OR%20Harnad%20OR%20archivangelism+blogurl:http://openaccess.eprints.org/&ie=UTF-8&tbm=blg&tbs=qdr:m&num=100&c2coff=1&safe=active#c2coff=1&hl=en&lr=&q=(apples+OR+oranges+OR+conflate)+blogurl%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fopenaccess.eprints.org%2F&safe=active&tbas=0&tbm=blg>?
I doubt it was OA vs non-OA articles. More likely it was articles in Gold
OA journals vs articles in toll journals. But the articles in toll journals
might have been Green
OA<http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html>.
And comparing Gold OA journal articles with toll journal articles is not
comparing OA with non-OA. (And if you compare OA articles with non-OA
articles<http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0013636>,
you can't draw conclusions about journal impact factor, error detection
rates or retraction rates.)

*Stevan Harnad*
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