What their strategy demonstrates
There’s been a lot of discussion lately of the Davis et al. paper purporting to demonstrate no open-access citation advantage. For the most part, my reaction to it dovetails with Stevan Harnad’s, and I therefore need not opine.
What I find interesting is the chosen scope of study: gold open access. Partly, to be sure, this picks up on Eysenbach’s PNAS paper; if you’re out to disprove somebody (and Davis is a notable OA skeptic), you’d better run a roughly-similar experiment. I do think something else is at work, though, and I’m confident enough about my hunch to predict studies we’ll see in the next five years or so.
It’s simple, really. Toll-access publishers are nervous about gold open access, seeing it as a direct competitor. Heretofore they have not been nervous about green, probably because of green’s low uptake (yes, yes, outside a few disciplines, granted). Ergo we get studies aimed at discrediting a gold-OA citation advantage. I’m certainly not implying that Davis is bought or insincere or anything of that nature, but I am willing to guess that Davis is hearing things from publishers, and has chosen to act on what he hears. I’ll even venture a mild suspicion that the arguably-premature publication of this article might be owed to publisher pressure.
The problem for publishers is that the next front they’ll have to fight on is indeed green open access, from the NIH Public Access Policy to the trickle of campus mandates. (I predict, by the way, that that trickle will remain a trickle for at least three years, and probably five to seven. If the California system had managed to tip the balance, that might have started a flood, but they’ve had to circle around for another go. Dear me, it’s mixed-metaphor day at Caveat Lector, isn’t it?) Probably the most effective way to go after the NIH policy is to exploit faculty fears about variant versions; rather than systematic studies on that front, I expect individual scare-stories about errors in PubMed Central article versions.
It’s when campus mandates start to make inroads that publishers will find themselves in real trouble from a public-relations and spin perspective, precisely because they have ignored, scorned, and winked at green open access so long. Any claim that self-archiving harms them, or harms faculty, will have to make headway against a fair bit of history demonstrating otherwise. I do expect some studies trying to debunk a green-OA citation advantage… but, honestly? They’re going to be hard to design to create the publisherly-correct outcome, if the trajectory of Roach Motel is any indication.
Should be an interesting few years.