Citation differences across research funding and access modalities – ScienceDirect

Abstract:  This research provides insight into the complex relationship between open access, funding, and citation advantage. It presents an analysis of research articles and their citations in the Scopus database across 40 subject categories. The sample includes 12 categories from Health Sciences, 7 from Life Sciences, 10 from Physical Sciences & Engineering, and 11 from Social Sciences & Humanities. Specifically, the analysis focuses on articles published in 2016 and the citations they received from 2016 to 2020. Our findings show that open access articles published in hybrid journals receive considerably more citations than those published in gold open access journals. Articles under the hybrid gold modality are cited on average twice as much as those in the gold modality, regardless of funding. Furthermore, we found that funded articles generally obtain 50 % more citations than unfunded ones within the same publication modality. Open access repositories significantly increase citations, particularly for articles without funding. Thus, articles in open access repositories receive 50 % more citations than paywalled ones.

 

Publishers can’t be blamed for clinging to the golden goose

“In the old pre-digital days of [scholarly] publishing, the true costs of providing print-on-paper to would-be users required the services of another profession for the production and delivery. But (let’s cut to the quick) those days are over, forever. Online publication is not altogether cost-free, but the costs are so ridiculously low that all an S&S author needs pay for is a blog service-provider, rather like a phone or email service provider.

In this world, the idea of paying a £2,700 (US$3,400) per article fee to publish is as grotesque as it is gratuitous….

So, you should ask, with online publishing costs near zero, and quality control provided gratis by peer reviewers, what could possibly explain, let alone justify, levying a fee on S&S authors trying to publish their give-away articles to report their give-away findings?

The answer is not as complicated as you may be imagining, but the answer is shocking: the culprits are not the publishers but the S&S authors, their institutions and their funders! The publishers are just businessmen trying to make a buck. In fact, £2,700 is the same amount they were making per article before the online-access era, in the Gutenberg era of print-on-paper….

The publishers’ golden goose had been successfully converted to ‘Fool’s-Gold OA’ (open access), meaning continuing to pay the obsolete costs at the same price, but as author-end fees for publication instead of user-end subscription fees for access. (‘Fair-Gold OA’ would have been to charge only the tiny fee for managing the peer review.)

The publishers are to be congratulated for successfully pulling off this scam, with the obsolete 40% mark-up of £2,700 per article in exchange for next to nothing suspended above by a skyhook, gloating, like the Cheshire Cat’s smile.

It is not as if the S&S community had no other choice. ‘Green OA’ self-archiving had been offered to them as an alternative, with the University of Southampton providing the free software for creating Green OA institutional repositories as well as the model for institutional and funder mandates that would require all university researchers and all recipients of research funding to self-archive their refereed research therein, immediately upon acceptance for publication (‘or perish’)….

That policy would have forced the publishers to downsize to the minimal remaining costs of managing peer review. But superstition (and habit, and digital laziness – of the fingers) prevailed, and the publishers are still laughing all the way to the bank.”

Antonia Seymour on why publishers matter – Publishers Association

“We’re fortunate to have the right honourable Lord David Willetts with us today. In his role as Minister for Universities and Science from 2010-2014, Lord Willetts saw open access as an enabling strategy that could unlock innovation and knowledge transfer.

10 years on and 95% of UK-authored research is published open access. What a tremendous example of what can be achieved when stakeholders in the research ecosystem work together to achieve a common goal.

Conducting science more openly undoubtedly accelerates scientific discovery. But doing so doesn’t necessarily mean that research has Impact.

There is plenty of data that shows that the final published version – known as the version of record – achieved via gold open access – is more discoverable, readable, citable, connected and credible than an accepted manuscript in a repository (so called Green open access).

How we make research openly available and how it is communicated is critical to its impact on science and society. Research dissemination being a planned process that academic publishers do really well….”

The Double-Cost of Green-via-Gold – The Scholarly Kitchen

“Like the Holdren Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Memo before it, the Nelson OSTP Memo articulates a “Green” public access mandate. Federal agencies are directed to ensure that “all peer-reviewed scholarly publications authored or coauthored by individuals or institutions resulting from federally funded research are made freely available and publicly accessible by default in agency-designated repositories without any embargo or delay after publication.” 

In a subscription world, the effort to develop and maintain federal agency repositories of funded research is an understandable expense; the enabled public access is an alternative to paywalled access. But as the Nelson Memo catalyzes a shift to open access publishing and the overall shift towards an open access world continues inexorably, should we reconsider the double-cost of this repository approach, given that the green public access copy will duplicate already provided open access?…”

Open access regulation

“Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act (hereafter: CA) entitles researchers to share a short academic work without financial consideration for a reasonable period. To facilitate exercising this right, the VSNU (Association of Universities in the Netherlands) completed a successful pilot project as a part of the National Programme for Open Science (NPOS) in 2019. The participating researchers gave universities their permission to share short academic works. 

The pilot’s evaluation showed that the efficiency of the administrative procedures for researchers to grant permission (by two-way paper licence) is an obstacle to scaling up. The solution was found in converting the so-called opt-in approach into a tacit licence procedure with the possibility to opt-out. 

The universities, as the employer, warrant the participating researchers to pay for the possible costs in the case of a legal dispute with a publisher. Within the VSNU, the universities agreed to share the legal risks. 

Considering that: 

the Eindhoven University of Technology supports the importance of Open Access, thereby following Dutch government policy as laid down in the letter of the State Secretary for Education, Culture and Science dated 15 November 20131; 

Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act (CA) entitles researchers to share a short academic work without financial consideration following a reasonable period after publication; 

the University has an interest in the academic output of its staff members being easily retrievable and, with a view to being a good employer, wishes to facilitate that its staff members can optimally exercise their rights under Article 25fa CA; 

the University requires a tacit, non-exclusive licence from its staff members for the purpose as mentioned above…”

Levels of Open Access · nasa/Transform-to-Open-Science · Discussion #454 · GitHub

“There’s a lot of different terminology around open access, particularly around various levels of open access. I thought it might be helpful to aggregate some of the disparate information into one source on the TOPS Github, which is below! This is sourced from Open Book Publishers, Researcher.Life, and Taylor & Francis.There are many kinds of open access, but they broadly fit into three categories: libre, which is open access that allows content to be free to read and generally, there are no barriers for reuse, gratis, which is open access that allows content to be free to read, but has barriers for reuse, and then there’s one level (black) that fits into neither libre nor gratis….”

Should the UK replace journals with a REF repository? | Times Higher Education (THE)

“There is a long-standing debate about whether the UK’s Research Excellence Framework is a waste of time and money given its insistence on re-assessing tens of thousands of papers that have already been reviewed by journals. Why not just base REF scores on journal rankings instead?

One answer is that, as Robert de Vries put it in a recent article for Times Higher Education, journal-administered peer review “sucks”. De Vries is conscious, though, that the obvious alternative to journals, post-publication review on subject repositories, might quickly descend into a social-media-style “attention-economy hellscape”, which would be even worse.

His solution is to oblige everyone who publishes on such platforms to undertake post-publication review to ensure that visibility is a function of merit. But I believe that a specific REF repository would be a better solution, eliminating reviewing redundancy while upholding high standards….”

Open Scholarship: A Decade of Progress – UC Davis Library

“In July, I will retire from UC Davis, after more than a decade serving as University Librarian and Vice Provost of Digital Scholarship.

A significant focus of my tenure at UC Davis has been advancing free and open access to information — both research and, for our students, affordable course materials….”

 

arXiv OSTP memorandum response – arXiv info

“Funding Agencies can expedite public access to research results through the distribution of electronic preprints of results in open repositories, in particular existing preprint distribution servers such as arXiv,2 bioRxiv,3 and medRxiv.4 Distribution of preprints of research results enables rapid and free accessibility of the findings worldwide, circumventing publication delays of months, or, in some cases, years. Rapid circulation of research results expedites scientific discourse, shortens the cycle of discovery and accelerates the pace of discovery.5

Distribution of research findings by preprints, combined with curation of the archive of submissions, provides universal access for both authors and readers in perpetuity. Authors can provide updated versions of the research, including “as accepted,” with the repositories openly tracking the progress of the revision of results through the scientific process. Public access to the corpus of machine readable research manuscripts provides innovative channels for discovery and additional knowledge generation, including links to the data behind the research, open software tools, and supplemental information provided by authors.

Preprint repositories support a growing and innovative ecosystem for discovery and evaluation of research results, including tools for improved accessibility and research summaries. Experiments in open review and crowdsourced commenting can be layered over preprint repositories, providing constructive feedback and alternative models to the increasingly archaic process of anonymous peer review….”

bioRxiv and medRxiv response to the OSTP memo – an open letter to US funding agencies

“Agencies can enable free public access to research results simply by mandating that reports of federally funded research are made available as “preprints” on servers such as arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv, and chemRxiv, before being submitted for journal publication. This will ensure that the findings are freely accessible to anyone anywhere in the world. An important additional benefit is the immediate availability of the information, avoiding the long delays associated with evaluation by traditional scientific journals (typically around one year). Scientific inquiry then progresses faster, as has been particularly evident for COVID research during the pandemic.

Prior access mandates in the US and elsewhere have focused on articles published by academic journals. This complicated the issue by making it a question of how to adapt journal revenue streams and led to the emergence of new models based on article-processing charges (APCs). But APCs simply move the access barrier to authors: they are a significant financial obstacle for researchers in fields and communities that lack the funding to pay them. A preprint mandate would achieve universal access for both authors and readers upstream, ensuring the focus remains on providing access to research findings, rather than on how they are selected and filtered.

Mandating public access to preprints rather than articles in academic journals would also future-proof agencies’ access policies. The distinction between peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed material is blurring as new approaches make peer review an ongoing process rather than a judgment made at a single point in time. Peer review can be conducted independently of journals through initiatives like Review Commons. And traditional journal-based peer review is changing: for example, eLife, supported by several large funders, peer reviews submitted papers but no longer distinguishes accepted from rejected articles. The author’s “accepted” manuscript that is the focus of so-called Green Open Access policies may therefore no longer exist. Because of such ongoing change, mandating the free availability of preprints would be a straightforward and strategically astute policy for US funding agencies.

A preprint mandate would underscore the fundamental, often overlooked, point that it is the results of research to which the public should have access. The evaluation of that research by journals is part of an ongoing process of assessment that can take place after the results have been made openly available. Preprint mandates from the funders of research would also widen the possibilities for evolution within the system and avoid channeling it towards expensive APC-based publishing models. Furthermore, since articles on preprint servers can be accompanied by supplementary data deposits on the servers themselves or linked to data deposited elsewhere, preprint mandates would also provide mechanisms to accomplish the other important OSTP goal: availability of research data.”

White House open access proposal would limit research and innovation  | The Hill

“We all share the goal of open access for taxpayer-funded research. However, the current OSTP proposal fails to address the crucial funding mechanism which allows for the peer-reviewed publication of vital research. We are eager to work with OSTP and Congress on an equitable solution which provides the necessary funding streams while ensuring the American public has open access to taxpayer-funded research….”

Rights retention built into Cambridge Self-Archiving Policy – Unlocking Research

“We’re delighted to announce that the University of Cambridge has a new Self-Archiving Policy, which took effect from 1 April 2023.  The policy gives researchers a route to make the accepted version of their papers open access without embargo under a licence of their choosing (subject to funder requirements). We believe that researchers should have more control over what happens to their own work and are determined to do what we can to help them to do that.

This policy has been developed after a year-long rights retention pilot in which more than 400 researchers voluntarily participated. The pilot helped us understand the implications of this approach across a wide range of disciplines so we could make an informed decision. We are also not alone in introducing a policy like this – Harvard has been doing it since 2008, cOAlition S have been a catalyst for development of similar policies, and we owe a debt of gratitude to the University of Edinburgh for sharing their approach with us. …”

Self-Archiving Policy | Open Access

“The SAP [self-archiving policy]

The SAP does not amend or alter the IPR Policy.
Unless the Researcher takes an alternative route to compliance with the relevant grant funder’s open access requirements (or the research funder has no open access requirements) and notifies the University of this by emailing info@openaccess.cam.ac.uk, the Researcher will:

(If the grant funder requires it) include the following wording in their submitted manuscript and any submission cover letter/note:

For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission;

and

 

automatically grant the University a non-exclusive, irrevocable, sub-licensable, worldwide licence, taking effect upon acceptance of the Accepted Manuscript for publication, to make the Accepted Manuscript publicly available in its institutional digital repository under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence from the moment of first publication (and / or such alternative licence as agreed with the relevant grant funder and the University in advance in writing)….”