Open access impact

Iryna KuchmaOpen Access Programme manager

Presented at “New Trends for Science Dissemination”, ICTP – Trieste, Italy, 27 September 2011

www.eifl.netAttribution 3.0 Unported

Visibility

Usage

Usage impact

Impact in the form of citations

Research efficiency

High-Energy Physics (HEP) has explored alternative communication strategies for decades, initially via the mass mailing of paper copies of preliminary manuscripts, then via the open access repositories.

In 1991, Paul Ginsparg, then at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, conceived arXiv, an internet-based system to disseminate preprints. arXiv was first based on e-mail and then on the web.

Research efficiency (2)

Nowadays the research cycle in HEP is approaching maximum efficiency as a result of the early and free availability of articles that scientists in the field can use and build upon rapidly

Research efficiency (3)

“Brody has looked at the pattern of citations to articles deposited in arXiv, specifically at the length of the delay between when an article is deposited and when it is cited, and has published the aggregated data for each year from 1991.

Research efficiency (4)

As more papers are deposited and more scientists use the repository, the time between an article being deposited and being cited has been shrinking dramatically, year upon year. This is important for research uptake and progress, because it means that in this area of research, where articles are made available at – or frequently before – publication, the research cycle is accelerating.” (From: Brody, Tim; Harnad, Stevan; Carr, Leslie.

Earlier web usage statistics as predictors of later citation impact. Journal of the American Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), 2005, Vol. 57 no. 8 pp. 1060-1072; and Swan, A. (2006) Open Access: What is it and why should we have it?).

Research efficiency (5)

Anne Gentil-Beccot, Salvatore Mele and Travis Brooks analysed almost two decades of use of preprints and repositories in the HEP community in “Citing and Reading Behaviours in High-Energy Physics. How a Community Stopped Worrying about Journals and Learned to Love Repositories” (http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.5418) and provided evidences that “submission of articles to an open access subject repository, arXiv, yields a citation advantage of a factor five”.

Research efficiency (6)

“the citation advantage of articles appearing in a repository is connected to their dissemination prior to publication, 20% of citations of HEP articles over a two-year period occur before publication”;

“HEP scientists are between four and eight times more likely to download an article in its preprint form from arXiv rather than its final published version on a journal web site.”

“When we are faced with a challenging scientific problem we cannot solve, what do we do? Many of

us would go to see our colleagues and ask for their advice. Our professional network is valuable. It is also limited. Perhaps there are people who are well-placed

to help us, in another university or company, in a different country, but we unfortunately do not know

them. Surely science would proceed faster if we could reach those people? Or, better, if they could find us?

This Commentary describes a case study — a chemical project where open-source methodologies

were employed to accelerate the process of discovery. The acceleration occurred because the project was open: relevant experts could identify

themselves.” (http://bit.ly/qxvkow)

“The process is transparent, meaning the public can be assured that funding for science, arising from their taxes, is being used responsibly and there is no suggestion of political interference in

the scientific process.

Open science is subject to the most rigorous peer review because the review process never ends,

essentially because there will always be a commenting function on results, and a

mechanism for the community to police those comments.”http://bit.ly/qxvkow)

“The results of open science, freely available on the web, can still be published in pre-publication peer-reviewed journals that accept work that has

previously been made public, because this serves as an important mechanism to summarize the research for future participants, and to reward

those who have contributed with authorship along a traditional model.” (http://bit.ly/qxvkow)

Citation impact

A number of studies have now been carried out on the effect of open access on citations to articles, showing the increased citation impact that open access can bring

Swan, A. (2010) The Open Access citation advantage: Studies and results to date. Technical Report , School of Electronics & Computer Science, University of Southampton: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18516/

Swan, A. (2010)

Around 35 studies

About 30 studies demonstrated that open access increases citations impact with an increase of up to 600% found in some cases, though most showed an increase of up to 200%.

Only a few do not show any increase in citations from open access.

Swan, A. (2010)

Swan, A.

Journal Impact factor (JIF)

Thomson-Reuters: the JIF shouldn’t be used for judging individual researchers.

Eugene Garfield (the man who invented the JIF): it should never be used to judge individual researchers.

JIF does not measure people & papers, tells nothing whatsoever about the quality of researchers' work.

“My personal belief is that we should be focussing on developing effective and diverse measures of the re-use of research outputs.

By measuring use rather than merely prestige we can go much of the way of delivering on the so-

called impact agenda, optimising our use of public funds to generate outcomes but while retaining some say over the types of outcomes that are

important and what timeframes they are measured over.”

Cameron Neylon: Warning: Misusing the journal impact factor can damage your science!

http://bit.ly/cbK2DK

re-use in industry

re-use in public health

re-use in education

re-use in policy development & enactment

re-use in research

Cameron Neylon: (S)low impact research and the importance of open in maximising re-use:

http://bit.ly/ntbzQ6

26/09/11

From SPARC Europe workshop “How to make your work OA”

Adapted from: John Houghton, Colin Steele and Peter Sheehan, Report to the Department of Education, Science and Training “Research Communication Costs in Australia: Emerging Opportunities and Benefits” [Online] Available at: http://www. dest . gov .au/NR/ rdonlyres /0ACB271F-EA7D-4FAF-B3F7-0381F441B175/13935/DEST_Research_Communications_Cost_Report_Sept2006. pdf

Group work

Problem solving: A positive approach

Step 1: Identify the goal: “I wish we could...”

Step 2: Identify the barriers: “I wonder how to...”

Step 3: Identify the solutions: “Perhaps we could...”

Thank you! Questions?