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Open Access Papers Read and Cited More

posted by LaminatorX on Thursday July 31 2014, @05:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the Bizarre-Cathedral dept.
Science

lhsi writes:

Analysis of journal articles in Nature Communications [data] has found that open access articles had been viewed more than twice as often as those articles accessible only to the journal's subscribers. Additionally, open access articles were cited a median of 11 times, compared with a median of 7 citations for subscription-only articles.

Related Stories

Costly Journals Add Almost No Value Over Freely-Available Pre-Prints 28 comments

canopic jug writes:

In the ongoing open access debate, which oldmedia publishers have been able to drag out for decades, oldmedia publishers have repeatedly made the assertion that articles in their very expensive journals are greatly improved during the publication process. Glyn Moody, writing at Techdirt, discusses the lack of value added by expensive, subscription-only journals over the original, freely-available pre-prints of the very same papers, thus negating the claims from the oldmedia publishers.

Such caveats aside, this is an important result that has not received the attention it deserves. It provides hard evidence of something that many have long felt: that academic publishers add almost nothing during the process of disseminating research in their high-profile products. The implications are that libraries should not be paying for expensive subscriptions to academic journals, but simply providing access to the equivalent preprints, which offer almost identical texts free of charge, and that researchers should concentrate on preprints, and forget about journals. Of course, that means that academic institutions must do the same when it comes to evaluating the publications of scholars applying for posts.

Scientific method requires that hypotheses be testable, and that means publishing anything necessary for a third party to reproduce an experiment. So some might even say that if your research ends up behind a paywall, then what you are doing is not even science in the formal sense of the concept.

Previously on SN :
New York Times Opinion Piece on Open Access Publishing (2016)
India's Ministry of Science & Technology Join Open-Access Push (2015)
Open Access Papers Read and Cited More (2014)

Original Submission

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  • (Score: -1, Redundant) by nyder on Thursday July 31 2014, @06:47AM

    by nyder (4525) on Thursday July 31 2014, @06:47AM (#75815)

    Besides the fact that most of us are probably cheap and don't want to pay, I'm thinking a lot of it's students who don't have the money with the super high cost of college these days.

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by maxwell demon on Thursday July 31 2014, @07:09AM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday July 31 2014, @07:09AM (#75818) Journal

      Nobody buys those journals themselves. The university who employs you does. Which means that if your university doesn't buy that specific journal, you'll not be able to read (and are unlikely to cite) the articles therein. Unless it's Open Content, then everyone has access, and is not dependent on the University's Library's budget.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by gringer on Thursday July 31 2014, @12:02PM

        by gringer (962) on Thursday July 31 2014, @12:02PM (#75870)

        Nobody buys those journals themselves. The university who employs you does.

        Or the university that you are studying at as a student. The library will generally get a subscription for all the people at the university, not just the academic staff.

        --
        Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]

  • (Score: 2) by gringer on Thursday July 31 2014, @12:08PM

    by gringer (962) on Thursday July 31 2014, @12:08PM (#75872)

    This is a pretty obvious outcome. Open access means everyone can read it, which increases the chance that a given person will read it, and someone will cite it.

    The question researchers should be asking is whether an author gets more financial benefit from those increased citations than the article processing charge. Answering that in the affirmative should give a big kick (at least for the people funding research) to encourage researchers to always publish open access.

    --
    Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]

    • (Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday July 31 2014, @01:28PM

      by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 31 2014, @01:28PM (#75901)

      Ignoring money, it might just be better science. More citations means it was more read. Its findings more likely to be repeated and confirmed. I would hope that the papers funding doesn't come from the paper but from an organization that wants the paper to be made.

      --
      SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by gidds on Thursday July 31 2014, @01:37PM

      by gidds (589) on Thursday July 31 2014, @01:37PM (#75904)

      This is a pretty obvious outcome.

      Obviousness isn't always a good predictor, though; things sometimes behave in unexpected or paradoxical ways.  (For example, just look at the recent Streisand Effect cases!)  That's why science is an experimental discipline.

      In this case, for example, it might have been that people saw subscription-only articles as having more prestige than open-access ones, and so read them more carefully and cited them more often.  But as this article shows, they don't — which is useful info.

      --
      [sig redacted]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 31 2014, @09:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 31 2014, @09:06PM (#76107)

    ...It appears he was right after all. RIP....

    http://freeculture.org/files/2013/01/Aaron_Swartz.jpg [freeculture.org]

    Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

    Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

    There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.

    That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable.

    "I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal -- there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's already being done: we can fight back.

    Those with access to these resources -- students, librarians, scientists -- you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not -- indeed, morally, you cannot -- keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.

    Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

    But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral -- it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

    Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it -- their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.

    There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

    We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

    With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge -- we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?

    Aaron Swartz
    July 2008, Eremo, Italy

    http://ia600808.us.archive.org/17/items/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008.pdf [archive.org]