What You’re Doing is Good for You
Posted by Tom Leinster
Like a foodstuff that’s both delicious and nutritious, making your articles open access is not only morally upstanding, but also gets you cited more:
Yassine Gragouri et al, Self-selected or mandated, open access increases citation impact for higher quality research.
Unfortunately it’s hidden behind a paywall. No, of course it’s not; it’s on the arXiv. The title pretty much says it all (and probably won’t come as a surprise). The ‘self-selected or mandated’ part is explained in the abstract…
Abstract:
Articles whose authors make them Open Access (OA) by self-archiving them online are cited significantly more than articles accessible only to subscribers. Some have suggested that this “OA Advantage” may not be causal but just a self-selection bias, because authors preferentially make higher-quality articles OA. To test this we compared self-selective self-archiving with mandatory self-archiving for a sample of 27,197 articles published 2002–2006 in 1,984 journals. The OA Advantage proved just as high for both. Logistic regression showed that the advantage is independent of other correlates of citations (article age; journal impact factor; number of co-authors, references or pages; field; article type; or country) and greatest for the most highly cited articles. The OA Advantage is real, independent and causal, but skewed. Its size is indeed correlated with quality, just as citations themselves are (the top 20% of articles receive about 80% of all citations). The advantage is greater for the more citeable articles, not because of a quality bias from authors self-selecting what to make OA, but because of a quality advantage, from users self-selecting what to use and cite, freed by OA from the constraints of selective accessibility to subscribers only.
Re: What You’re Doing is Good for You
When some of the federal states of Germany introduced tuition fees a couple of years ago, one of the key arguments was that “in a capitalistic system something that does not cost anything is not appreciated”. I never liked that kind of argument, and I would very much like to know who came up with it, and why some politicians kept on using it - it seems to ignore the crucial role that fun, intellectual adventuresomeness and social capital play in academia.
Hypothetical question: If I told John that I got his books “An Introduction to Algebraic and Constructive Quantum Field Theory” and “Gauge Fields, Knots, and Gravity” illegaly as djvu-download from the internet, would he try to sue me or would he be glad that I’m interested in reading them?