Stevan Harnad
Moderator, American Scientist Open Access Forum
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
and
Chaire de recherche du Canada en sciences cognitives
Université du Québec à Montréal
The
research
community fills about 24,000 peer-reviewed research
journals across all fields and languages
worldwide, publishing about 2.5
million articles per year. The output of one research-active university might be from 1000 to 10,000
or more articles per year depending on size and productivity.
Researchers are
employed, promoted and salaried -- and their research projects are
funded -- to
a large extent on the basis of the usefulness and impact of their
research.
Research that is used more tends to be cited more. So citations are
counted as
a measure of usage and impact.
The
dollar value
(in salary and grant income) of one citation varies from field to
field,
depending on the average number of authors, papers and citations in the
field;
the marginal value of one citation also varies with the citation range
(0 to 1
being a bigger increment than 30 to 31, since 60% of articles are not
cited at
all, 90% have 0-5 citations, and very few have more than 30 citations: http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/classement_citations.htm
). A much-cited study
estimated the "worth" of one citation (depending on field and range) in
1986 at
$50-$1300: http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v11p354y1988.pdf
One
of the ways
researchers try to maximize the usage and impact of their research is
by
submitting them to journals with high "impact factors" (i.e., average
citation
counts per article). Journal impact factors vary as citations do: Most
journals
hover just below and above 1 (excluding author self-citations);
journals with
impact factors above 30 are rare. Success in getting a paper accepted
by a high
impact journal depends on the paper's quality and the rigor of the
standards of
the journal's peer review system. In general, higher impact journals
(in the
same field) tend to have higher rejection rates: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/BMJ.html
But
now there is
a new way to increase every article's research impact, over and above
publishing it in the highest quality journal whose peer review
standards it can
meet: The online medium has now made it possible for authors to supplement the usage and impact that
their research
receives from those users whose institutions can afford to subscribe to
the
journal in which the article is published with the usage and impact of
all
potential users whose institutions cannot afford to subscribe to the
journal in
which it is published -- by self-archiving an online version of the
article in their own institutional
web archive, openly accessible to all would-be users webwide: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
There
is now a growing number of studies on research impact for articles
across all
fields,in each case comparing the citation counts (always within the
same
journal and year) for articles that have and have not been
self-archived by
their authors. With virtually no exceptions the articles that have
self-archived supplements are turning out to have 50% to over 300%
greater
research impact than those that do not: http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html.
Considering that 90% of research articles today have 5 or fewer
citations, this
is a dramatic result for research progress itself, even before we try
to
translate it into its financial "worth" to researchers and their
institutions
in terms of prestige and research income in 2005.
Yet,
despite its substantial benefits, self-archiving --
now at 10-20% across fields -- is still growing far
too slowly: http://www.isinet.com/isihome/media/presentrep/essayspdf/openaccesscitations2.pdf
There
exist at least 200 institutional open-access archives worldwide, but
most are
less than 20% full, relative to each institution's annual output of
research
articles. Canada, with 27 of those archives, is fourth in the world in
archive
number (after the US, UK and Germany)
but
its archives are as underfilled as the rest, even though Canada is also
high in
proportionate research output
http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/analyse_pays.htm
Researchers
have been slow to self-archive, partly because they are not yet aware
of its
benefits, and partly because they feel they already have enough to do
(unaware
that it takes only 6-10 minutes per article to self-archive it: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/).
Publishers are certainly not at fault for the fact that authors have
been so
slow to self-archive: Ninety-two percent of the 8450 journals surveyed
to date
(including most of the top journals) have already given their authors
an
explicit green light to self-archive: http://romeo.eprints.org/
In
two international surveys, researchers have indicated exactly what
needs to be
done to get them to self-archive: Seventy-nine percent of authors
replied that
they do not now self-archive, and will not self-archive, until and
unless their
employers or funders require them to do so;
but if/when they do require it, they will self-archive,
and self-archive
willingly:
http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/ppts/02-AlmaSwan.ppt
The
remedy is on
the way: At the recent international conference at the University of
Southampton UK on formulating a concrete policy for institutions to
adopt in
order to implement the Berlin Declaration on Open Access -- http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/outcomes.html
-- the delegates recommended exactly what the researchers in the two
surveys
had indicated was needed in order to motivate them to self-archive: an
institutional self-archiving mandate. And soon afterward, some of the
world's
biggest research institutions (including FranceÕs CNRS and the
multinational
CERN) led the way by adopting the policy: http://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php
It
is now time for Canada to follow suit:
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
to the benefit of Canadian researchers, their institutions, their
funders,
their funder's funder (i.e., the Canadian tax-payer) and to the benefit
of
(worldwide) research itself.