JISC

Rachel Hardy and Charles Oppenheim (Loughborough University) Tim Brody and Steve Hitchcock (University of Southampton) September 2005

Report summary

A report designed to:

• Examine present sources for citation information on Open Access content
• Suggest a framework for citation services for Open Access materials and a structure for the collection and distribution of citation information
• Discover the main requirements of such services
• Make recommendations accordingly in a national and international context

The authors are interested in Citation counts because they are a good way to work out the research impact of an article. Open Access is thought to increase the citation count – and the authors expect that as awareness spreads that Open Access increases visibility, so Open Access will become more popular. Searchable Open Access collections can also (potentially) make citations counts easier to carry out – although a careful structure has to be worked out in order to make that work.

The report was based on desk research, interviews with 18 respondents from amongst funding bodies, librarians, authors, “Experts in OA”, producers of reference management services and the UK Research Assessment Exercise.

Literature review

The desk research and literature review provides a broad overview of the history of Open Access and why it makes more sense from an economic viewpoint (for institutions anyway), especially in fields where the aim of publication is not profit-related. They note how much OA has grown in the years up to 2005 and state that for further growth that there are services to improve searchability and article visibility… although there’s something of a Catch-22 here, in that there has to be enough OA material available for the searches and co to be worthwhile.

They also point out another major influence on growth: the fact that Open Access journals can potentially gain a lot of citations – and in a short time. They cite a number of reports showing free archives on the web have a much greater research impact.

They note that academics have conflicting attitudes to OA. They want published works to be accredited, complain about high costs and prefer free access – but don’t often use it. They also note the widespread confusion among academics about how to use Open Access and archive their work.

They then survey funding bodies’ growing support for Open Access, as well as the support Open Access is increasingly getting from national governments and international organisations. Then they provide background information about initiatives like the Research Assessment Exercise before investigating what other scholars have said about the advantages and disadvantages of other Citation Indexing Services like CrossRef, Google Scholar, CiteSeer, Citebase Search, Scopus, OpenURL, DublinCore and The Web Of Knowledge, explaining how Citation Indexing works, what Journal Impact Factors are and the developing field of Webometrics.

The interviews

The overall gist of the above review was that Open Access is growing and that the citation indexing services available have strengths – but also many weaknesses. The authors suggested a model for improving these services (Based on the standardisation of bibliographic metadata and having one autonomous user driven structure for undertaking citation information) and then asked their interview subjects for responses on its viability. The response was broadly positive, although there were concerns about some aspects of the proposal such as the need to make authors enter references in a specific format and the fact that it only targets Open Access material. They were especially critical about the clarity of the proposal and the amount of work individual authors would have to put in to make it work.

The recommended proposal

Following the interview-feedback, the report now moves onto a far more detailed analysis of a recommended proposal. It’s all about cutting costs and increasing ease of use by standardising and automating procedures for citation indexing and harvesting. They point out especially the need for well-referenced meta data at the point of deposit in archives, the need to develop a standards based approach to the storage and communication of reference data.

They conclude by pointing out that the proposal needs to be tested before it can be incorporated into a production version of repository software.

Key points

Researchers

An OA system that has proper citation tracking built into it could potentially greatly raise authors’ visibility. It will also provide: more accurate, more comprehensive and, possibly, cheaper citation indexes.

The vast majority of publishers charge for, and therefore limit, access to journals.

A number of recent studies have shown that Open Access increases the number of citations for articles and their research impact.

Putting material in OA repositories is far easier than most researchers think: “The biggest obstacle to the success of institutional and subject-based repositories seems to be adoption by faculty. The main reason for this problem seems to be that depositing papers takes too much time (Mackie, 2004), (Carver, 2003). This is despite the fact that it has been argued that it only takes a few minutes (Suber, 2005a) and a few keystrokes (Carr and Harnad 2005).”

Just two years after the release of PLOS Biology, an open access journal, Thomson ISI gave it an impact factor of 13.9… which means it’s one of the most highly cited journals in life sciences. An outstanding stat from a journal that’s less than two years old… with a new publisher.

PLOS Biology’s website also got 500,000 hits in its first 8 hours online.

BioMed Central has over 200,000 users.

Institutions

A properly catalogued OA system could: “help measure usage of institutionally-provided resources by its authors (e.g., which journals have been cited).”

It would also improve the visibility of its work.

The Business Case for Open Access

Impact measuring services could become free of charge if it’s simply a matter of collecting data from searchable OA material.

The ability of institutions to afford access to all the refereed literature has declined further than ever.

They cite a report (Harad and Hemus 1997) claiming that the “Faustian bargain” institutions struck with publishers to make material available in print format favoured publishers whose profits are made by restricting access to material. A good solution would be to make all refereed literature freely available online…

BioMed central has shifted the costs on to individuals and institutions that use if for publishing by charging $500 author fees.

“By reducing the entry barriers to citation services - by making citation links as easy to use as Web links – it would be simple enough for individuals to harvest and analyse citation data, and to provide free services.”

Thus considerably reducing costs.

Read the full report (Word)