The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access: An Update

Abstract

Abstract. The research access/impact problem arises because journal articles are not accessible to all of their would-be users, hence they are losing potential research impact. The solution is to make all articles Open Access (OA, i.e., accessible online, free for all). OA articles have significantly higher citation impact than non-OA articles. There are two roads to OA: the "golden" road (publish your article in an OA journal) and the "green" road (publish your article in a non-OA journal but also self-archive it in an OA archive). About 10% of journals are gold, but over 90% are already green (i.e., they have given their authors the green light to self-archive); yet only about 10-20% of articles have been self-archived. To reach 100% OA, self-archiving needs to be mandated by researchers' employers and funders, as they are now increasingly beginning to do.The research journal-affordability problem and the resulting university libraries' journal budget crisis were what first brought the research article-access/impact problem to light, but the journal-affordability problem and the articleaccess/impact problem are not the same. According to Ulrichsweb [http://www.ulrichsweb.com/ulrichsweb/analysis/], about 25,000 peer-reviewed research journals exist worldwide, across all disciplines and languages, publishing about 2.5 million articles per year. But because journal prices keep rising and library budgets are limited, each university can afford only a small portion of that total. That means their users have access to only a fraction of those articles, even though, in the online age, we would have expected otherwise. This is the research journal-affordability problem.What the journal-affordability problem unmasked was a further problem: As a consequence of the fact that most of their would-be users at most universities cannot access most of the 2.5 million articles published yearly (because their universities cannot afford the journal access-tolls), a significant portion of the potential research impact of those inaccessible articles is being lost. An article's research impact is the degree to which its findings are read, used, applied, built-upon and cited by researchers in their own further research and applications. Research impact is a measure of the progress and productivity of research. That is the reason why researchers' careers (their salaries, promotions, tenure, funding, prestige, prizes) depend on their impact; it is also why their universities (which co-benefit from the research funding, progress and prestige) as well as their research funding agencies (which are answerable for the way they spend tax-payers' money) reward research impact.Merely to do the research and then put your findings in a desk-drawer is no better than not doing the research at all. Researchers must submit their research to peer review (Harnad 1998) and then "publish or perish," so others can use and apply their findings. But getting findings peer-reviewed and published is not enough either: Other researchers must find the findings ...

Who publishes in “predatory” journals?

“…There are green and gold roads to OA (Harnad et al, 2004(Harnad et al, , 2008. Many of the gold OA publishers charge an author fee for publication, and a group of questionable journals has been identified that takes money from authors upon acceptance of their papers while maintaining a low to nonexistent standard of quality control (Beall, 2010(Beall, , 2012b.…”

Open access increases citations of papers in ecology

“…Lawrence (2001) first reported that OA could increase citation advantages in computer science and related disciplines. His conclusion has received support (Antelman 2004, Hajjem et al 2005, Eysenbach 2006, Harnad et al 2008, Norris et al 2008, Evans and Reimer 2009, Gargouri et al 2010, Riera and Aibar 2013, Clements 2017. In a review, for instance, OA citation advantages were reported in 27 out of 31 studies of different disciplines, including computer science (Lawrence 2001), physics and mathematics (Harnad and Brody 2004), electric and electronic engineering (Antelman 2004), and political science (Atchison and Bull 2015).…”

Tudománymetria és neveléstudomány

“…A nyílt hozzáférés keretében két fő modellt különböztetünk meg, az "arany utat" és a "zöld utat" (Harnad, Brody, Vallieres, Carr, Hitchcock, Gingras és Hilf, 2008)…”