Re: Open access to research worth £1.5bn a year

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

I assume that no one is taking Harnad's voodoo economics seriously except
Harnad himself, and even there one has doubts, but the one statistic he
does not quote is the one policy-makers in the UK are likely to pay
attention to, namely, that the UK is a net exporter of research literature
and the destruction of the publishing industry that he implicitly
advocates (all his protestations to the contrary) would have a negative
impact on foreign exchange.  Something to think about when the price rises
in London for a crust of bread.

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Stevan Harnad" <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>; "AmSci Forum" 
<american-scientist-open-access-forum@amsci.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 25, 2005 12:12 PM
Subject: Re: Open access to research worth £1.5bn a year

> Picked out of the air? I reported (and provided the references and URLs)
> the strong new empirical evidence that open access articles consistently
> receive 50%-250% more citations, comparing always within the same journal
> and same year. Here are some summary data at the discipline level:
[SNIP]

> I then took a low-end conservative figure for OAc at 50% and applied it to
> the conservative figure of 85% not yet self-archived, to yield 50% x 85% x
> £3.5.bn = £1.5bn worth of loss of return (in terms of citations) on the
> RCUK's £3.5.bn annual investment.
>
> As noted, it is not the number of articles published annually (about
> 130,000) that represents the return on the UK's research investment; it is
> how much those articles are used, applied, and built-upon. Research
> published but not used, applied and built-upon is research that may as
> well not have been done or funded at all. The citation counts are measures
> of the degree to which research is used, applied and built-upon --
> "research impact."
>
> The UK is losing 1.5bn worth of potential research impact annually (on our
> conservative, low-end estimate) for the 85% of it that it is not yet
> self-archiving (another conservative estimate). The RCUK open-access
> self-archiving mandate -- *if* it is not hobbled into an open-ended
> embargoed-access policy, as the NIH policy proposal was -- will remedy all
> of this needless loss of research impact and return on the UK public
> investment in research.
[SNIP]

> Please note that I did not say the UK was getting *no* return on its
> research investment: Even non-OA articles get used and cited -- but only
> by those users whose institutions can afford the toll access to the
> journal version. The empirical 50-250% citation-gap corresponds to the
> loss of the potential research impact from those users who are currently
> denied access. Self-archiving the author's version is done to maximise
> usage, impact, and hence the return on the public investment, by making
> the research accessible to those access-denied would-be users too.
[SNIP]