Open access papers are cited more frequently than subscription-based articles, according to a study published this week in PLoS Biology, an open access journal. However, these findings alone may not persuade more authors to consider open access publishing, experts said.
This report "tends to confirm what many people suspected would be the case," said Kenneth R. Fulton, executive director of the National Academies of Science and publisher of Proceedings of the National Academies of Science. But how widely applicable these findings are, and whether they will induce authors to consider open access publishing is unknown, he added....
Previous research has examined the influence of open access on citation impact. The latest study focused on papers in PNAS, which began offering a per-article open access publishing option (costing from $750 to $1,000 per article) on June 8, 2004. Study author Gunther Eysenbach,...measured raw citation data zero to six months after publication, four to 10 months after publication, and again 10 to 16 months after publication. Open access articles were cited more heavily both four to 10 and 10 to 16 months after publication, both when Eysenbach considered only raw data and when he also accounted for such potential "confounders" as number of authors, past productivity, country of corresponding author, and submission track. For instance, after adjusting for confounders, open access articles were almost three times more likely than non-open access articles be cited at least once 10 to 16 months after publication. Self-archiving, in which authors post a paper for free on the Internet, also appeared to increase citations. There was "a clear relationship between the level of openness and the citation levels," Eysenbach writes....
One author who might switch [to OA] is Steven Gross, a researcher at the University of California, Irvine, who published a non-open access paper about intracellular actin-based transport in PNAS in September 2004. "I would be more inclined to publish open access" in light of these results, he said in an Email.
"My feeling about the paper is that it's welcome and a step forward," David Hoole, head of brand marketing and content licensing at Nature Publishing Group (NPG), told The Scientist. But Hoole said he doubted this paper will motivate many authors to seek out open access, because when it comes to deciding where to publish, authors will be more influenced by conditions imposed by their grants than by the possibility of more citations. Nature currently has no plans to switch to an open access model, "but we are always considering our options," Hoole said. Some NPG journals offer open access, or a hybrid open access/fee-based approach akin to that at PNAS....
Eysenbach told The Scientist he plans to continue monitoring his dataset at six-month intervals, noting that his latest data suggest the open access advantage continues to widen at 16 to 22 months post-publication.
Comment. Just one quick response to David Hoole's comment, "[W]hen it comes to deciding where to publish, authors will be more influenced by conditions imposed by their grants than by the possibility of more citations." What grant conditions is he thinking about? The trend among funders is to encourage or require OA, although they are doing it through OA repositories rather than OA journals. If Hoole meant that funders will nudge grantees to submit to prestigious journals, like Nature, then his response begs the question. Nature may not choose OA, even in the face of this evidence, but why doesn't it? Eysenbach's study, and the many previous studies along the same lines, raise the question of incentives to journals, not just incentives to authors. The question is especially sharp for prestigious journals, which essentially owe their prestige to citations. Because the evidence that OA boosts citation impact is solid and growing, it's much more pertinent to ask when prestigious non-OA journals will feel the weight of it than to assume that authors will always have to choose between prestige and OA. There's no intrinsic trade-off between prestige and OA. Some prestigious journals are already OA and vice versa. The gap will close further when journals, even the most prestigious, see that they have their own interests in OA, and that it's not just something to benefit authors, readers, libraries, universities, funders, and citizens.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/16/2006 04:01:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
