In his column Bad Science, in The Guardian on Saturday 14 February, Ben Goldacre drew attention to an article in the British Medical Journal by Tom Jefferson et al in which the observation was reported that...
"Publication in prestigious journals is associated with partial or total industry funding, and this association is not explained by study quality or size."
...Goldacre doesn't have an explanation. The suggestion is given in his column (he admits it is an "unkind suggestion") that it may have to do with journals' interest in advertisements and reprint orders – which can indeed be massive – from the very same industry that funds the research these journals publish. He doesn't say it, but this could mean, of course, that the journals accept articles based on research funded by industry, particularly the pharmaceutical industry, more readily than articles based on publicly-funded research.
I don't have an explanation for the phenomenon, either, but I doubt that journals accept industry-funded articles more easily than public sector articles....
A hypothesis I can imagine, however, is different and less sinister, although also to do with the massive numbers of reprints disseminated by the pharmaceutical industry. But this hypothesis would reverse cause and effect. Might it be that because of the wide dissemination, availability, and visibility of these reprints, the industry-funded articles are cited more often? After all, we know that articles are not only cited because they are the most appropriate ones, but also simply because they are the appropriate ones known to the author....If articles based on industry-funded research are cited more often, the journals in which they appear get a higher Impact Factor.
If this hypothesis holds water, it would mean that wide availability is one of the important factors – with dissemination and visibility, and of course relevance – for being cited. In other words, could the results described in the BMJ article constitute evidence that open access could have a similar effect on Impact Factors as that – still hypothetically – caused by the massive numbers of reprints that the pharmaceutical industry purchases and disseminates?...
Comment. Jan's hypothesis suggests a fascinating and potentially testable way to generalize the thesis behind the OA impact advantage: any kind of increased access should also increase impact. OA increases access in a large and conspicuous way. Systematically distributing non-OA reprints increases access in a smaller way, and for people outside medicine, a less conspicuous way; but it may carry its own impact advantage. As usual, the difficulty is to identify an appropriate control group so that we test the hypothesis by comparing apples with apples. Would it be enough to compare reprinted articles with unreprinted articles from the same journal? The same issue of the same journal? Would it be enough to compare the impact of an article before and after it was reprinted? What other kinds of access enhancements, short of OA, could be tested for an impact advantage? TA journal circulation?
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/19/2009 04:57:00 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.
