Gaulé, Patrick & Maystre, Nicolas (2011) Getting cited: Does open access help? Research Policy (in press)

G & M: “Cross-sectional studies typically find positive correlations between free availability of scientific articles (?open access?) and citations? Using instrumental variables, we find no evidence for a causal effect of open access on citations. We provide theory and evidence suggesting that authors of higher quality papers are more likely to choose open access in hybrid journals which offer an open access option. Self-selection mechanisms may thus explain the discrepancy between the positive correlation found in Eysenbach (2006) and other cross-sectional studies and the absence of such correlation in the field experiment of Davis et al. (2008)? Our results may not apply to other forms of open access beyond journals that offer an open access option. Authors increasingly self-archive either on their website or through institutional repositories. Studying the effect of that type of open access is a potentially important topic for future research…“

What the Gaulé & Maystre (G&M) (2011) article shows — convincingly, in my opinion — is that in the case of paid hybrid gold OA, most of the observed citation increase is better explained by the fact that the authors of articles that are more likely to be cited are also more likely to pay for hybrid gold OA. (The effect is even stronger when one takes into account the phase in the annual funding cycle when there is more money available to spend.)

But whether or not to pay money for the OA is definitely not a consideration in the case of Green OA (self-archiving), which costs the author nothing. (The exceedingly low infrastructure costs of hosting Green OA repositories per article are borne by the institution, not the author: like the incomparably higher journal subscription costs, likewise borne by the institution, they are invisible to the author.) 

I rather doubt that G & M’s economic model translates into the economics of doing a few extra author keystrokes — on top of the vast number of keystrokes already invested in keying in the article itself and in submitting and revising it for publication. 

It is likely, however — and we have been noting this from the very outset — that one of the multiple factors contributing to the OA citation advantage (alongside the article quality factor, the article accessibility factor, the early accessibility factor, the competitive [OA vs non-OA] factor and the download factor) is indeed an author self-selection factor that contributes to the OA citation advantage.

What G & M have shown, convincingly, is that in the special case of having to pay for OA in a hybrid Gold Journal (PNAS: a high-quality journal that makes all articles OA on its website 6 months after publication), the article quality and author self-selection factors alone (plus the availability of funds in the annual funding cycle) account for virtually all the significant variance in the OA citation advantage: Paying extra to provide hybrid Gold OA during those first 6 months does not buy authors significantly more citations.

G & M correctly acknowledge, however, that neither their data nor their economic model apply to Green OA self-archiving, which costs the author nothing and can be provided for any article, in any journal (most of which are not made OA on the publisher’s website 6 months after publication, as in the case of PNAS). Yet it is on Green OA self-archiving that most of the studies of the OA citation advantage (and the ones with the largest and most cross-disciplinary samples) are based.

I also think that  because both citation counts and the OA citation advantage are correlated with article quality there is a potential artifact in using estimates of article or author quality as indicators of author self-selection effects: Higher quality articles are cited more, and the size of their OA advantage is also greater. Hence what would need to be done in a test of the self-selection advantage for Green OA would be to estimate article/author quality [but not from their citation counts, of course!] for a large sample and then — comparing like with like — to show that among articles/authors estimated to be at the same quality level, there is no significant difference in citation counts between individual articles (published in the same journal and year) that are and are not self-archived by their authors.

No one has done such a study yet  — though we have weakly approximated it (Gargouri et al 2010) using journal impact-factor quartiles. In our approximation, there remains a significant OA advantage even when comparing OA (self-archived) and non-OA articles (same journal/year) within the same quality-quartile. There is still room for a self-selection effect between and within journals within a quartile, however (a journal’s impact factor is an average across its individual articles; PNAS, for example, is in the top quartile, but its individual articles still vary in their citation counts). So a more rigorous study would have to tighten up the quality equation much more closely). But my bet is that a significant OA advantage will be observed even when comparing like with like.

Stevan Harnad
EnablingOpenScholarship

This paper looks at the reality of implementation of e-commerce standards in the book and journal supply chains, and at where the barriers are to more widespread implementation. It compares this with the situation in other media, and looks at some of the challenges of convergence and divergence. Although the challenges identified are considerable, it finishes by discussing why there may be reasons for optimism about the future.

The set of NLM DTDs have emerged as a de facto standard content interchange for STM publishers over the past several years. Recently, the ACS Publishing Division has utilized customized forms of these DTDs made public by the NLM to implement XML-based publishing processes for our chemistry-related journals, books, and magazine publications. In this paper, we look at the drivers behind our decisions of whether customizations should be made, and if so, how much customization is needed, to meet the needs of our publication processes. To frame the discussion of the various customizations, we also offer the concepts of a customization level, a customization implementation method, and a customization profile. At the end, we share some of the successes and lessons from our experiences.

Andrew Pettegree’s The Book in the Renaissance and John B. Thompson’s Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century share a number of striking similarities. Both are ambitious and accomplished works of scholarship, handsomely bound, competently designed and edited, a pleasure to hold and read. Hefty in intellectual vigor yet eloquent and accessible to an audience beyond a narrow field of research, they are what Thompson describes as “high-quality books with a scholarly content, often (but not always) written by scholars, [that] have the capacity to sell into a general trade market if they are developed and marketed properly” (page 182). They represent the apogee of the types of scholarly works prized by collectors in the early era of print, collectors such as Fernando Colón, the son of Christopher Columbus, whom Pettegree describes fondly, with praise for his remarkable catalogues and annotations about his book purchases, now nearly as invaluable as the works themselves. While Thompson’s previous book, Books in the Digital Age, focused on university presses and other academic publishers exclusively, in Merchants of Culture they are discussed at the margins of the field of trade publishing, the locus of Thompson’s lens in his present volume. In the early days of print, these works of scholarship were the trade.

The promise of XML was that it would enable seamless, automated interchange of content, using standard tools, technologies, and shared XML vocabularies. The experience of many cultural memory institutions, however, makes it clear that there are limits to the interoperability of even standards-compliant XML content. This paper explores some sources of and ameliorations to this variation in the use of standard XML vocabularies.

Standardization is a poorly understood discipline in practice. While there are excellent studies of standardization as an economic phenomenon, or as technical a phenomenon, or as a policy initiative, most of these are ex post facto and written from a dispassionate academic view. They are of little help to practitioners who actually are using and creating standards. The person actually creating the standards is working in an area of imperfect knowledge, high economic incentives, changing relationships, and often, short-range planning. The ostensible failure of a standard has to be examined not so much from the focus of whether the standard or specification was written or even implemented (the usual metric), but rather from the viewpoint of whether the participants achieved their goals from their participation in the standardization process. To achieve this, various examples are used to illustrate how expectations from a standardization process may vary, so that what is perceived as a market failure may very well be a signal success for some of the participants. The paper is experientially, not empirically based, and relies on my observations as an empowered, embedded, and occasionally neutral observer in the Information Technology standardization arena. Because of my background, the paper does have a focus on computing standards, rather than publishing standards. However, from what I have observed, the lessons learned apply equally to all standardization activities, from heavy machinery to quality to publishing. Standards names may vary; human nature doesn’t.

In creating PubMed Central (PMC) , the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine (NLM) needed a common format, with a single Document Type Definition (DTD), for all content in PMC. The first version of the NLM DTD was made available to the public in early 2003, and it quickly became the de facto standard for tagging journal articles in XML even outside the NLM. As usage grew, users and potential users started asking about formalizing the article models as a standard with the National Information Standards Organization (NISO). Work on the NISO standard began in late 2009, and the Journal Article Tag Suite was released as a Draft Standard for Trial Use as NISO Z39.96 in March 2011.

The process of managing electronic content is increasingly complex, significantly more so than traditional print distribution. Over the past decade, there have been significant investments in the standardization of various parts of the supply chain of published information. Some of these standards have been successful, some less so. This article describes some NISO standards that impact electronic resource management and reasons why some have been successful and why others have faced challenges in adoption. Since there are limited resources available to standards development, questioning what makes a project successful or not, will help to improve our project selection moving forward.

Digital technologies now enable books and other digital resources to be openly available to those with access to the Internet. This study examined the financial viability of a religious publisher that put free digital versions of eight of its print books on the Internet. The cost to put these eight books online was $940. Over a 10-week period, these books were downloaded 102,256 times and sales of these books increased 26%. Online sales increased at a much higher rate. Comparisons with historical book sales and sales of comparable titles indicate that that this increase may have been connected to the free books being available. There was a modest correlation between book downloads and print sales.
Keywords: open educational resources, e-books, open access, open culture, e-commerce.