Rapid Responses to:
|
|
Rapid Responses: Rapid Responses published:
-
![[Read Rapid Response]](/icons/misc/sectionDOWN.gif)
Open Access Misdefined: Open Access Findings Missed
- Leslie A Carr, Stevan Harnad (15 April 2005)
-
Technological problems in this study: PDF
- Chung-hong Chan, Daniel K Ng (13 May 2005)
-
Response to Carr and Chan
- Jonathan D. Wren (21 May 2005)
|
|
|||
|
Leslie A Carr, Snr Lecturer University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, Stevan Harnad
Send response to journal:
|
'Open access and openly accessible' concerns papers available from sites other than the journal's own website. Open Access, defined by the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2001 (http:// www.soros.org/openaccess/), consists of two alternative activities. EITHER authors can make copies of their articles available on other websites (or 'archives') apart from those provided by the publishers OR authors can publish their papers in Open Access (free-to-read) journals. The paper is concerned with the first of these options, but by misdefining Open Access (OA) as just the second option (ie 'moving from a publishing model where readers pay for access to one where authors pay for publication', commonly known as Open Access Publishing) this paper somehow ignores both the phenomenon that is being measured (Open Access-ibility) and the significant research that has risen around it. Having equated OA with OA Publishing the author goes on to add that 'the National Institutes of Health announced its intention to require open access publication of all its funded research,' when in fact the NIH is NOT asking for Open Access Publishing (which would gravely restrict the choice of journals to which work could be submitted) but for parallel deposit of each paper in an Open Access web archive, whichever journal they have been published in. The paper's conclusion (that the likelihood of finding a medical paper online is higher for higher impact journals and for more recent articles) is irreproachable, but not new. The increasing quantity of openly accessible literature is not at issue; of more interest is its implication for the literature, for example how it affects citation impact. An entire online bibliography of such studies -- http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html -- has among them a prior BMJ article -- http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/329/7471/0-h -- an article that likewise overlooked all existing findings: http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/eletters/329/7471/0-h#80657 Competing interests: None declared |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Chung-hong Chan, Research Assistant Department of Paediatrics, Kwong Wah Hospital, Hong Kong, 852, Daniel K Ng
Send response to journal:
|
The study by Wren found a correlation between the time since initial publication and the probability of availability of reprint in portable document format (PDF) in non journal website. (1) Wren concluded his study by "publications are becoming increasingly available online as time goes by". This conclusion is not justified as a very important confounding factor was not adjusted. Wren only selected the reprint in PDF format. According the web-based information, PDF technology was publicly available from Adobe since 13 June 1993. (2) Technically speaking, no journal can distribute their reprint in PDF before 13 June 1993. Some minority of journals, e.g. Journal Sleep, scanned their old papers from 1979 and redistributed them by PDF. However, majority of journals started to distribute PDF reprint since late nighties. For example, BMJ distributed PDF in their journal archive since 1997. We think that the correlation between the time since initial publication and the probability of availability of reprint in non journal website was probably due to the progressive availability of the PDF technology and the adoption of PDF by the journals throughout 1994 to 2004. The selection of only PDF reprint in this study made this correlation a little bit artificial. Reference (1) Wren JD. Open access and openly accessible: a study of scientific publications shared via the internet. BMJ 2005; 330: 1128. (2) Lours L. The history of PDF. Available online: http:// www.prepressure.com/pdf/history/history01.htm Accessed on: 13 May 2005 Competing interests: None declared |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Jonathan D. Wren, Research Scientist University of Oklahoma, Stephenson Research and Technology Center, Norman OK 73019
Send response to journal:
|
Carr and Harnad (1) bring up a good point that, in my study(2), I did not draw a sharp distinction between the terms “open access” and “open access publishing”. I apologize if this led to any confusion as to the NIH’s stance – Carr and Harnad are correct that the NIH has not suggested any intention to restrict the choice of journals in which authors can publish (see http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/nihfaq.htm for a thorough discussion of NIH open access policy). However, the reason I did not draw a sharp distinction is that depositing one’s research in a publicly available archive is functionally the same as open access publishing. In both cases, readers have free (“open”) access to published research. The modern definition of “publish” certainly encompasses more than just the printed form of an article, and thus deposition into a publicly accessible archive is also a form of publishing. It also needs to be noted that archiving papers on an individual’s website may be different than depositing them in a centralized archive (e.g. eprints, arxiv) that explicitly encourages search engine indexing or submits entries to search engines. Many of these homepage-based articles may not be as accessible, both because search engine indexing of web pages is incomplete and because many home pages eventually “decay” over time as people move, retire or just neglect to resurrect dead web servers. Chan and Ng (3) point out that the Adobe PDF format was not adopted by all journals at equal times, and suggests that the increase over time in PDFs available at non-journal websites that was reported in my study may instead reflect the gradual adoption of the PDF format as a standard. However, this could only be the case if one of three things were true: If either the online accessibility results were pooled from a broad selection of journals, all article types were being queried, or journals created/provided PDF reprints to varying degrees every year. The first is not the case, as the reported trends of increasing availability were for individual journals. The second is not the case as only papers classified in MEDLINE as “Journal Articles” were queried (e.g. some journals initially provide PDFs for journal articles but not news items or commentaries because of the added work, but may then later decide to also provide their commentaries as PDFs). The third does not seem likely, as each journal adopted the use of PDF format as a means of distributing reprints at a specific point in time. Although this specific time will indeed vary by journal as noted by Chan and Ng, it is nonetheless a binary decision: Either a journal is creating/providing PDF reprints for journal articles or not – it is not likely to be providing PDF reprints to some authors and not others. Such a technology adoption curve could only be captured if journal provision of PDF reprints occurred within the middle of a publication year, and even then the portion of the curve that reflects this phenomenon would only span a total of two years. Thus, the long-term increases in the number of reprints (PDFs) from individual journals, by recency of publication, that are locatable online is not likely influenced to a significant degree by a technology adoption curve as suggested by Chan and Ng. (1) Carr LA, Harnad S “Open Access Misdefined: Open Access Findings Missed” BMJ rapid response (15 April 2005) (2) Wren JD. Open access and openly accessible: a study of scientific publications shared via the internet. BMJ 2005; 330: 1128-31. (3) Chan C, Ng DK “Technological problems in this study: PDF” BMJ rapid response (13 May 2005) Competing interests: I am the author of the article being referenced |
|||