The Chronicle of Higher Education reports in its Wired Campus blog on a recent study that finds no significant citation advantage for open access articles compared to traditional subscription based articles. This runs counter to other studies that suggest open access articles do see higher citation rates. But a mixed record of citation impacts should be no surprise to those who have followed this research area.
The headline-level synopsis of this and other studies attempting to discern the impacts of open access research obscure a multitude of methodological concerns. They also downplay significant differences found when breaking the data down by field, country, or other factors.
In the particular study at issue, roughly one-fifth of over 3,200 articles in 36 subscription-based journals were randomly made open access over 2007 and early 2008. (It is perhaps worth noting that the journal that published this study is produced by FASEB, an association of scientific societies, many of whom have fee-based journals that underwrite their operations.) While the study found a notable increase in downloads, there was no notable increase in citations.
In contrast, a much more comprehensive study found an eight percent increase in citations overall, with much greater increases in citations for researchers in developing countries. The lead researcher on the first study has speculated that most people that would be making the citations do not have issues with accessing the literature, which sort of supports the conclusions of the second study.
From a policy perspective, these results do not mean that open access is a failure. Read the rest of this entry »
