Core : Three Access Levels To Underpin Open Access / quote 9 of 10
Building confidence in open access
The second often discussed issue is that of building confidence in Open Access. Apart from a few successful OA journals, such as those maintained by PLoS or BioMed central, it is still (possibly wrongly) believed that OA journals today typically do not compare in terms of impact factor with their commercial counterparts. However, the traditional impact measures based purely on citations are inappropriate for use in the 21st century (Curry, 2012) where scientific debate is happening often outside of publications, such as on blogs or social websites, and where scientific results do not always materialise into publications, but also into datasets or software. Instead of trying to achieve high impact factors by establishing government policies that would require researchers to deposit their results as Open Access, we need to develop a technical infrastructure that will be completely transparent and will enable us to establish new measures of scientific importance. At the same time we need methods and tools that will provide analytical information, including trends, about the OA content. This will strengthen the argument for both academics and publishers to adopt Open Access as a default policy.