PDF《Impact for Higher Quality Research》

1 Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research Yassine Gargouri1 , Chawki Hajjem1 , Vincent Larivière2 , Yves Gingras3 , Les Carr5 , Tim Brody5 &

Stevan Harnad,4,5

1 Institut des sciences cognitives, U.

du Québec à Montréal

2 Observatoire des Sciences et des Technologies, U. du Québec à Montréal

3 Canada Research Chair in the History and Sociology of Science, U. du Québec à Montréal

4 Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Sciences, U. du Québec à Montréal

5 School of Electronics and Computer Science, U. of Southampton Corresponding Author: S. Harnad, Institut des sciences cognitives, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal, Québec CANADA H3C 3P8 [email protected]

2 Abstract: Background: Articles whose authors make them Open Access (OA) by self-archiving them online are cited significantly more than articles accessible only to subscribers. Some have suggested that this OA Advantage may not be causal but just a self-selection bias, because authors preferentially make higher-quality articles OA. To test this we compared self-selective self-archiving with mandatory self-archiving for a sample of 27,197 articles published 2002-2006 in 1,984 journals. Methdology/Principal Findings: The OA Advantage proved just as high for both. Logistic regression showed that the advantage is independent of other correlates of citations (article age;

journal impact factor;

number of co-authors, references or pages;

field;

article type;

or country) and greatest for the most highly cited articles. The OA Advantage is real, independent and causal, but skewed. Its size is indeed correlated with quality, just as citations themselves are (the top 20% of articles receive about 80% of all citations). Conclusions/Significance: The OA advantage is greater for the more citeable articles, not because of a quality bias from authors self-selecting what to make OA, but because of a quality advantage, from users self-selecting what to use and cite, freed by OA from the constraints of selective accessibility to subscribers only. It is hoped that these findings will help motivate the adoption of OA mandates be universities, research institutions and research funders. One-sentence Summary: We demonstrate that the greater citation impact of open access research is causal rather than an artifact of author bias (i.e., authors self-selectively making higher quality research open access) by showing that the citation increase is just as great when the open access is mandatory;

the open access impact advantage is independent of other correlates of citation impact, and greater for higher quality research. Introduction The 25,000 peer-reviewed journals and refereed conference proceedings that exist today publish about 2.5 million articles per year, across all disciplines, languages and nations. No university or research institution anywhere, not even the richest, can afford to subscribe to all or most of the journals that its researchers may need to use (Odlyzko 2006). As a consequence, all articles are currently losing some portion of their potential research impact (usage and citations), because they are not accessible online to all their potential users (Hitchock 2009). This is supported by recent evidence, independently confirmed by many studies, that articles whose authors have supplemented subscription-based access to the publisher'

s version by self-archiving their own final draft to make it accessible free for all on the web

3 ( Open Access , OA) average twice as many citations as articles in the same journal and year that have not been made OA. This OA Impact Advantage has been found in all fields analyzed so far -- physical, technological, biological and social sciences, and humanities (Lawrence 2001;