[GOAL] Re: Tireless Ad Hoc Critiques of OA Study After OA Study: Will Wishful Thinking Ever Cease?

[Andrew A. Adams]

I wrote:
> > You are putting the cart before the horse here. A decision to cite
> > depends (when the researcher is doing their job properly) on being
> > able to read. Only after an article has been read can the decision
> > to cite or not come into it. 
Jan replied:
> Of course, quite right: you can only cite an article if you have read it. In my experience, the access to non-AO-articles is sufficient to suggest what I'm suggesting: there could be a citation advantage for OA articles, but it might be lower than one might presume, if it exists at all.
> 
> > If I don't have access to the article, it doesn't even get added to my citaton database
> 
> If it might be a truly relevant article, you are doing yourself not a favor. Of course it depends what goals you have, but if an article might influence your conclusions, one should do more to read it then stop when some site says no go.

It might be relevant, but in the part of my post that you excised I pointed 
out that there are more articles published within my (very broad, very 
interdisciplinary) area than I could possibly read, even if I spent all my 
time reading and not writing or teaching or thinking. What else am I supposed 
to do with the hundreds (yes, really!) of articles that I locate through back 
and forward reference searches, special issues on relevant topics, google 
scholar searches and personal recommendations? That's the typical starting 
point for me. I don't have the research funds or the inclination to give 
publishers more for an individual article (to which I often am then only 
granted access for one day so that if I manage to accidentally delete the PDF 
I have to pay again) than I do for a whole book on many topics. There are 
enough articles on enough topics that are accessible either through 
subscription or OA that I ignore the ones I can't access. I'd prefer to be 
able to include them in my initial browsing but financial issues intervene 
(and the financial issues also waste my time because the first approach to an 
article is waste when I can't then access it, but I'd be throwing good money 
after bad time if I then paid for access individually and the only options I 
know are: subscription access, OA, direct eprint or per article fees (this 
last including ILL which takes longer and still costs).

My time and my money are both in limited supply and so I access what I can 
without spending more of either than is reasonable. Values of reasonable vary.

Another anecdote. One of my former colleagues (from a second tier UK Uni) is 
currently on sabbatical and a visiting prof at a first tier UK uni. One of 
the things she is very happy about with the visiting position is the 
enormously greater access to the literature that their subscription basis is 
giving her. She works in a very similar manner to me but at her main 
institution is hampered in her research by lack of access. Just this last 
couple of weeks while visiting me she has accessed tens, perhaps as many as a 
hundred, articles through the library subscription of the uni with the better 
access. But she's still found articles she can't access through them or OA 
and we've given up on them to focus on the ones we do have access to.

There IS an access problem and so far I am convinced that the evidence is 
that the only way to solve the access problem is universal OA mandates into 
researcher's institutional repository. It's the only mechanism that has a 
clear scaling factor and demonstrated method for achieving near-100% 
accessibility. Show me a better way and I'll happily embrace it, but in the 
meantime I'll keep on reading what I can access and saving my research money 
and time for things which really need them. I provide universal access to all 
my articles. My colleagues should do the same and stop blaming anyone but 
themselves and their institutions for the access problem, and stop being 
distracted from the access problem by discussion of the affordability problem 
or claims of no access problem by librarians (and others).


-- 
Professor Andrew A Adams                      aaa at meiji.ac.jp
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/