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Publishing in Scientific Journals

So there is Gold OA (immediate), Green OA (immediate), Gold DA,
and Green DA. If desired, this can be further subdivided in terms of
Gratis (free online access) and Libre (free online access plus re-use rights)
OA and DA.
As official mandates by universities and governmental funding agencies
are expected to increase self-archiving rates (Harnad et al., 2008),
Harnad, Suber, and other OA-supporters urge institutes and funding
agencies to demand immediate institutional deposit, irrespective of possi-
ble embargo periods. This would put the onus of complying on the fun-
dee, threatened to lose further funding, or the university employee
(professor, researcher), fearing to lose their job altogether.

3.2.7 The OA Impact Advantage

The debate surrounding the effect of OA started with a publication by
Lawrence (2001), analyzing conference proceedings in the field of com-
puter science. It seems obvious that the earlier an article is available the
sooner it can be downloaded and consequently cited. In this way an
advantage on similar research can be built up. Yet, if an author places
only her better manuscripts in an OA repository, before it is published in
a regular journal and it receives more citations than an average article, not
placed in an OA repository and published in the same journal, then the
reason for this difference in citations is not obvious. Is it because the arti-
cle was OA? Was it because it was available earlier? Or was it because it
was simply a better article? And if papers placed in OA repositories
(Green OA) are generally the better ones, wouldn’t that lead to the false
conclusion that OA leads to more citations? Similarly, for Gold OA, if
scientists are only willing to pay (assuming author-pays OA) for their best
works, then naturally these receive on average more citations.
Early studies on the OA impact advantage include Antelman (2004),
Harnad and Brody (2004), Kurtz et al. (2005a), and Eysenbach (2006). In
all cases a citation effect was observed. Harnad and Brody claimed that
physics articles submitted as preprint to ArXiv and later published in peer-
reviewed journals, generated a citation impact up to 400% higher than
papers in the same journals that had not been posted in ArXiv. Kurtz et al.
(2005a) found in a study on astronomy evidence of a self-selection bias—
authors post their best articles freely on the web—as well as an early view
effect—articles deposited as preprints are published earlier and are there-
fore cited more often. The point is, which of the three causes led to the