Now that those programmes are there, I can ensure you that our problem to access science is solved. There is no doubt about the benefit of R4L programmes.

For the first time we have a real programme that can help us. You register, you get a password then you have access to more than 7000 scientific journals. Let me not talk about the cost of those journals and our financial capacity!!!.

Education, scientific research, and transfer of knowledge and technology to developing countries are a very complicated equation. Your reaction shows clearly your ignorance of our reality as researchers from the developing world.

Instead of attacking Dr. Plume I advise you to go and look for something else that can help developing countries if you are really willing to help.

Good Luck for !!!.

Juma

Accra, Ghana

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Response from Phil Davis:

Dear Juma,
You are misunderstanding my argument. I am not attacking Dr. Plume nor the merits of the R4L programs. I am merely pointing out that the argument that R4L is responsible for a large and “profound impact” on increasing article output from participating countries is based on very rudimentary and methodologically weak evidence. As I wrote:

There is no doubt that providing free access to the scientific literature to those in developing countries is a good thing. These programs, and those who made them happen, should be extolled for delivering scientific knowledge to those institutions that could previously afford only a tiny portion of the world’s published literature. But making causal claims on such rudimentary analysis should have been more tentative.

Seems like a double-standard is in effect.

Making general categorical comparisons between countries participating in R4L and those what do not is difficult because the two groups are not equal. Pairing is a common method in social sciences and economics of getting around this problem: If the eligibility guideline (based on the country’s GNI) is arbitrary, then selecting one just below the cut-off and one just above the cut-off may work to reduce (but not completely eliminate) systematic bias in the analysis.

An analytical model in which other predictors of article production were included (number of scientists, R&D grants and funding, etc.) would enable you to estimate the effect of R4L independently of other potential causal variables.

Even if access to R4L programs does not appear to have an effect on research output, there are many other benefits of these programs on teaching, medical practice, agriculture, government policy making, among others. It is not necessary to promote a causal claim between R4L and article production on such rudimentary analysis for everyone to understand the benefits of these free and subsidized literature programs.

Let’s put science back into scientific publishing.

It is interesting that you choose ask what reporting percentage changes “obscures what is really going on in the data” and then go on to selectively highlight the article counts from WoS (which is actually not the source of my dataset, but an aggregated extraction thereof produced by Thomson’s Research Services Group) of the country with the lowest absolute counts. I am not at liberty to publish my raw data owing to the terms of my license agreement (and thus no ‘report’ could be produced, as you lament), but my counts are in line with your own analysis. I would be interested to know if you are also able to recreate the second chart from the press release showing a clear upswing in article output coinciding with the launch and uptake of HINARI around 2002 for these selected R4L-eligible countries, but with no comparable effect in the non-R4L country Japan. I accept your arguments about sample sizes and the confounders that we acknowledged, but how do we attempt to explain their simultaneous upswing after 2002 that is not also seen in non-R4L countries? In my data I see no such trend for India, Brazil or South Korea, whose outputs grow constantly across the period 1996-2008 in a way similar to that of Japan. The change from around 2002 onward also fits well with the qualitative data available from testimonials of R4L beneficiaries, including that from the Nigerian librarian quoted in the press release.

I am delighted with your suggestions for improvements to the methodology for future studies. The point on studying cited and citing behaviour is already in hand, with a study currently in preparation by Thomson. I am unclear on how the pairing you suggest would control for bias, since the socio-political, economic, education and innovation systems of each country will differ markedly – how would ‘similarity’ be measured?

Dr Andrew Plume, Associate Director – Scientometrics & Market Analysis, Elsevier