Caveat Lector

So there’s been a study that hints that the usual “open access increases citation impact!” line is subject to a chicken-and-egg problem. Examination of four math journals seems to have indicated not so much that open access increased citations, but that high-quality work by high-quality researchers is made open-access to begin with.

Quite a few people are questioning the study’s conclusions, not least because of an extremely small and specialized sample size. I’m not, except insofar as I just did. I want to do a little thought experiment instead. What if they’re right?

I hope I’m not the only repository-rat in existence to see an obvious and compelling new story to tell. “The best researchers are going OA—so you should too!” I like this story. It should play well. Researchers always have their eyes on their field’s hotshots.

Possibly because the open-access field is led by one or two dyed-in-the-wool dogmatists of the most rigidly dogmatic variety, we have gotten a little too attached to some of our stories. I’m still disturbed to have met a publisher of open-access journals who was upset at finding success through other roads than ideology. As long as they’re coming, who cares why? Especially because some of OA’s benefits to a journal are clearly structural; imitate as they may, no toll-access journal can reproduce them.

Word is that the authors of the study I cited at the beginning of this post have been asked to pull their punches because of potential damage to open access. Anyone making such a request should be ashamed of doing so. Examine the study, yes. Question its results, yes. Perform other studies in hopes of contradicting this one, yes. Suppress unfavorable research? No, no, a thousand times no!

Better we should learn to roll with the punches. Sometimes that isn’t even hard.