From the 3-23-06 Library Journal Academic Newswire:
Looking at mathematics journals in the arXiv repository at Cornell, researchers Phil Davis and Michael Fromerth crunched numbers hoping to shed light on two pressing questions. First, do the articles in arXiv get more citations than non-deposited articles? And second, are the articles in arXiv associated with fewer downloads from publishers' sites? Both answers appear to be yes. According to their study, an analysis of 2,765 articles published from 1997-2005 in four journals, the articles deposited in arXiv received 35 percent more citations on average than non-deposited papers, and 23 percent fewer publisher downloads. Those findings are now initiating some intense discussion. "Personally, I was skeptical of finding any evidence for reduced download," Davis told the LJ Academic Newswire. "I had seen reports from several publishers and thought they were jumping to unsupportable conclusions. The data, however, spoke for itself." Davis, a life sciences librarian and bibliographer, says there is "clear evidence" that articles deposited in the arXiv receive "significantly fewer downloads" from the publishers' websites. Equally eye-opening, however, is another aspect of the paper: why the articles they looked at had more citations.
Since 2001, Davis notes, the general assumption was that increased access led to increased citations. "It was a simple model and it seemed to confirm what librarians wanted to hear," he said. "What we did in our analysis that wasn't done in most of the studies before us was to attempt to ascertain how [the citation increase] really happens." Davis says his research indicates that a number of factors, not just open access, are responsible for the increase in citations. The authors tested a number of postulates, including evidence of a "quality differential" postulate—that is that better articles are deposited in arXiv—and found "a lot of evidence" supporting this explanation. "We are not arguing that open access has no effect on citations," he said, "just that its effect may be severely limited to highly-cited articles." While the authors acknowledge the limitations of their research, they say that, for some, their conclusions "challenge the dogma that open access is a single and unqualified cause" for increased citations. Instead, "there are likely multiple behavioral causes working simultaneously," Davis asserts. Meanwhile, that conclusion seems to have generated some unease among OA advocates. "This paper has started some really stimulating dialog," Davis said, adding that it has also "upset many people," who fear the results will be used to impugn OA. "I've been told that it will unfairly benefit publishers, and we have received multiple requests to change the wording of our abstract." Davis says he is resisting those requests, but welcomes others to test his study, and to conduct their own in other disciplines.
Posted by stemp003 at March 28, 2006 10:18 AM