May 19, 2006, 11:15
By Sophie Hebden and Christina Scott
Scientific papers freely available on the internet make a bigger impact than many people realise, according to a new study available on the online Science and Development Network. The findings will strengthen calls for more online scientific journals to switch to the open-access model and make research freely available.
Journal subscriptions are too expensive for many scientists in developing countries, making open-access their sole means of keeping up to date with research in the rest of the world. The author of the study, published this week in the prestigious Public Library of Science online series Biology, concludes that "open-access is likely to benefit science by accelerating dissemination and uptake of research findings".
Gunther Eysenbach, a health policy specialist at the University of Toronto in Canada, monitored the number of times each of 1 500 papers were cited in later studies. The papers were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - the American equivalent of the Academy of Science of South African (ASSAf). The journal has a 'hybrid' publishing model, meaning that authors can choose to pay a $1 000 fee to publish their papers for immediate free access on the journal's website. All other papers become open-access six months after publication.
Twice as likely
Eysenbach found that open-access papers were twice as likely as other papers to be cited 4-10 months after publication. This increased to three times as likely 10-16 months after publication. More surprisingly, the study found that articles published as open-access from the start on had a higher impact than articles published as non-open-access, which researchers had 'self-archived' on other websites.
Eysenbach, editor of the open-access Journal of Medical Internet Research, says this could be because few scientists search the internet for an article if they have encountered problems viewing it on the journal website.
Subbiah Arunachalam of the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation in India says, however, that self-archiving is the best approach, even though many journals waive the open-access fee for developing country authors. "I believe that open-access archiving is a better option because it would allow us to achieve 100% open-access more quickly," he said in an interview published on 10 May on technology journalist Richard Poynder's web blog, Open and Shut?
Increase visibility
Meanwhile, South African research journals have been urged to dramatically increase their visibility - to policymakers, taxpayers who often fund the research, and readers across the developing world - by creating open-access internet editions as soon as possible. The Academy of Science of South Africa, led by University of Pretoria vice-principal Robin Crewe, made the call after an inquiry that found that in the past 14 years, one-third of South African journals have not had a single paper cited by their international counterparts. "Some of the journals are not worth the paper they are printed on," says Anastassios Pouris, director of the Institute for Technological Innovation at the University of Pretoria and co-author of the academy's report.
The academy's executive officer Wieland Gevers, who led the investigation, stresses that a considerable body of world-class research has emerged from South Africa over time, much of it published to an international audience. But fewer than one in ten of South Africa's 255 accredited journals has been cited enough to feature in the main international research databases, despite South Africa being the continent's leading publisher of research.
R84 000 per article
Egypt and Kenya, by contrast, each have only one indexed journal. Gevers says the government's system for subsidising journals must be reformed to improve their quality and visibility. Currently, the department of education pays universities R84 000 each time a government-accredited journal publishes a paper by one of their academics, regardless of the journal's international standing. Gevers says the department should divert $165 of the subsidy to the journals, to allow them to fund online and open-access editions.
"I'm very happy with the report," said Dan Ncayiyana, editor of the South African Medical Journal, which is among the few to rank in international databases. "It captures the situation very well and I think it's good for South African science publishing."
Adi Paterson of the department of science and technology, which commissioned the study, welcomes the report as a basis for strengthening "incentives to support high-quality research publications" and to "forge a low cost open-access approach to the publishing of publicly funded research". - SciDev.Net
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