The recommendations of the UK’s recent Finch report, looking into
potential models for the expansion of access to the published findings of
research, sparked interesting
discussions about the value and philosophy of gold vs. green open access publishing.
The Finch report recommends a
model whereby research findings, particularly when research is publicly-funded,
should be published in open access or hybrid journals and funded by Article
Processing Charges (APCs) (‘Gold OA’). In
his blog, Open Access Archivangelism, Stevan
Harnad, one of the outspoken critics of the Finch report
recommendations, argues that this model simply puts more money, out of scarce
research finds, into the coffers of the publishers in exchange for making
single articles freely accessible. Harnad argues in favour of cost-free OA self-archiving
of research publications (‘Green OA’).
The questions of where and how research output is published and
how to achieve maximum impact are key to authors, funding agencies and
institutions.
Scholarly evaluation is traditionally done by measuring citation counts
in order to calculate the journal impact factor, and journals with a high impact factor are usually
preferred by authors. Increasingly, other metrics are emerging that are primarily
based on usage such as the number of article requests and downloads. Increasing
attention is also paid to discussions that appear in social media – a key
aspect, for example, in the altmetrics movement. In
essence, impact cannot be measured only by scholars who publish and cite but
needs also to take into account users of scholarly material.
Coming back to Open Access, there are a number of papers
discussing impact of Open Access material, the bibliography of the effect of
open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact, published as
part of the OpCit project, is a
brilliant source of articles in this area. M. Riera and E. Aibar (2012), for
example, conclude in their analysis of articles
published in intensive care medicine “Open access publishing and the Hirsch
index of the first signing author increase the impact of scientific articles”. There is also a nice graph on Matthew Cockerill’s blog about how a specific journal increased its impact after moving to
Open Access. Open Access publishing has certainly grown dramatically over the
past years and continues to do so. Heather Morrison provides some insights on
her blog.
I did a little experiment with the bX usage data to check how
usage of Open Access material is reflected in bX Hot Articles. I took the
183 top used articles in medicine and the medical subcategories as calculated
by Hot Articles for May 2012
and checked how many are freely accessible as open access articles. The result
– 64 (35%) are either available for free from publisher sites, institutional
repositories or other Web sites. It’s quite a high percentage. It will be
interesting to repeat this experiment with more data in six months.
Usage is a good measure of the impact of an article and in order
to increase usage an article needs to be discoverable and accessible – ideally via
the institution’s central discovery system. This, of course, brings us to Primo Central. From the outset, Primo Central has indexed
data from open access collections and from institutional repositories and continues
to do so. Just recently we reached agreements with several institutions to make
their repositories globally discoverable via Primo Central. Primo Central also
indexes an increasing number of open access articles available in hybrid
journals that contain both free and for-fee articles, and enables access to
such open access material not only to subscribing institutions but to all
users. As a result, a significant number of these articles are now reaching the
wider audience for which they were intended. Exciting times!
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Harnard is completely right to pillory the hybrid models where institutions, universities and laboratories pay to read AND to publish. Since they can't stretch their budgets any further, it is disastrous and it reduces considerably research funding possibilities!
ReplyDeleteI'm happy to read that Ex Libris will make institutional repositories discoverable via Primo Central. Will it be only limited to references with an OA full text or will all archived references be integrated into Priomo Central?