Open access journals sometimes get a bad rap from would-be authors, who think that they have low impact and visibility (i.e., prestige). Two recent articles give the lie to that notion. One is a study by Thomson ISI, the good people who bring us the Science Citation Index. The other is an editorial by Stevan Harnad, one of the prime thought leaders in the open access movement, in which he comments about the ISI results.
ISI's white paper studied the 8,700 journals the company indexes for its Web of Science product. Of those, almost 200 are considered open access (OA). The largest subject categories, accounting for some 95 of the 191 OA titles, were Medicine and Life Sciences.
Overall, ISI found that OA journals perform very similarly to fee-based journals. If anything, they have a slight tendency to earlier citation. Journals which have experimented with their fee model, such as the British Medical Journal, have not lost ground on any of their quality measures for it. But just providing free access didn't guarantee higher levels of citation.
Harnad's commentary lends some context to the ISI white paper. He suggests that a more meaningful comparison would be to measure the impact of articles that appear in the same journal, some of which subsequently have been made OA by their authors in self-archives, and some of which have not. He cites work that substantiates clear benefits for the self-archivers, with some startlingly high numbers for “reads” and citation impact ratios.
So, this is good news for OA proponents. First, ISI is accepting OA journals, giving them the visibility that comes with such indexing. Further, ISI is studying the performance of the OA group, and promises to update its results next year. Those results so far show that OA performance is no worse than non-OA. And looked at from Harnad's angle, OA performance far exceeds non-OA.
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