Comments on: Open Access Not the Focus in Ophthalmology

By: Philip Davis

Philip Davis — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 13:43:30 +0000

I know of only one study to date which looks at the effect of freely-accessible medical literature on medical practice.

see:

David J. Hardisty, D. A. F. H. (2008). Diffusion of treatment research: does open access matter? Journal of Clinical Psychology, 64(7), 821-839. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/jclp.20492

Abstract
Advocates of the Open Access movement claim that removing access barriers will substantially increase the diffusion of academic research. If successful, this movement could play a role in efforts to increase utilization of psychotherapy research by mental health practitioners. In a pair of studies, mental health professionals were given either no citation, a normal citation, a linked citation, or a free access citation and were asked to find and read the cited article. After 1 week, participants read a vignette on the same topic as the article and gave recommendations for an intervention. In both studies, those given the free access citation were more likely to read the article, yet only in one study did free access increase the likelihood of making intervention recommendations consistent with the article.

By: Philip Davis

Philip Davis — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 13:38:35 +0000

Very good point. The Davis et al. study [1] measures both readership (as article downloads) and citations. While it does not report a difference in citation frequency to freely-available articles, it does demonstrate that freely-accessible articles receive significantly more downloads and unique visitors. Many of these downloads, however, can be the result of indexing robots (like Google).

There is no doubt that medical fields like ophthalmology have many practitioners who read — but do not contribute to — the literature. Much more work needs to be done on this front.

I think we can conclude that if there is an “open access citation advantage” it is indeed very small and not nearly in the same range (200%-700%) promoted in the earlier studies.

[1] Davis, P. M. et al. (2008). Open access publishing, article downloads and citations: randomised trial. BMJ, 337, a586. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.a568

By: Philip Davis

Philip Davis — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 13:31:59 +0000

Dear Jim,
Below are citations to some articles which dispute access being a contributing cause of the citation advantage:

Kurtz, M. J., Eichhorn, G., Accomazzi, A., Grant, C., Demleitner, M., Henneken, E., et al. (2005). The effect of use and access on citations. Information Processing and Management, 41, 1395-1402. http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0503029v1

Kurtz, M. J., & Henneken, E. A. (2007). Open Access does not increase citations for research articles from The Astrophysical Journal: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. http://arxiv.org/abs/0709.0896

Moed, H. F. (2007). The effect of ‘Open Access’ upon citation impact: An analysis of ArXiv’s Condensed Matter Section. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(13), 2047-2054. http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0611060v1

Davis, P. M., Lewenstein, B. V., Simon, D. H., Booth, J. G., & Connolly, M. J. L. (2008). Open access publishing, article downloads and citations: randomised trial. BMJ, 337, a568. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.a568

Gaulé, P., & Maystre, N. (2008). Getting cited: does open access help? : CEMI Working Paper 2008-007. http://ilemt.epfl.ch/repec/pdf/cemi-workingpaper-2008-007.pdf

By: Anne Marie Cunningham

Anne Marie Cunningham — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 20:47:14 +0000

I agree with Christina. We need to evolve metrics which allow assessemnt of how useful the work is to practitioners, and tracking of what Boyer called the scholarship of application.
This sounded like an interesting presentation that could support this:
http://blogs.ubc.ca/pkp2009/2009/07/10/enriching-digital-citation-networks-using-web-20-principles/

By: Christina Pikas

Christina Pikas — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 15:54:34 +0000

Michael J Kurtz (in a recent talk I attended) pointed out that in fields such as ophthalmology, there are many users of the articles who do not create new citations. In the fields he’s studied, usages follow citations (the curves are basically the same shape, just shifted). I’m not really surprised that OA hasn’t increased citations, but maybe that’s not the question for ophthalmology. Maybe the question for fields with clinicians/practitioners is if OA increases usage.

By: Jim Richardson

Jim Richardson — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 07:25:06 +0000

Would you like to expand on “growing wealth of evidence”?

The authors’ conclusion does not accord with the idea that their result is general: “Unlike other fields of science, open access thus far has not affected how ophthalmology articles are cited in the literature.”

For an example of a different result, suggesting that open access via self-archiving does enhance citations in agricultural research, see http://iaald.blogspot.com/2009/07/open-access-enhances-accessibility-and.html .