Citations trump other game-theoretic incentives for OA
Stevan Harnad, The Name Game: Names Get In Our Way, Open Access Archivangelism, December 28, 2006. This is a comment on the article I excerpted in my previous post. Excerpt:
In “Quantum Game Theory and Open Access Publishing,” Hanauske et al (2006) try to use game-theoretic modeling — pitting “author-reputation” (in the form of citations) against “journal-reputation” — to show that authors will inevitably switch from “traditional publishing” to “open access publishing.” This would be a welcome conclusion if Hanauske et al’s underlying assumptions and their definition of OA publishing had been valid. But the article defines “Green OA” as self-archiving in an Institutional Repository, “Gold OA” as publishing in an OA journal, and “OA Publishing” as a “third option,” with self-archiving in Arxiv (a Central Repository) as its prime example. In reality, of course, self-archiving in Arxiv is not OA publishing at all, but simply another example of OA self-archiving (Green OA). Hence the assumption that “OA Publishing” (in this incorrect sense) pits “author-reputation” (citations) game-theoretically against “journal-reputation” (with citations eventually winning) is invalid too. The correct conclusion, requiring no game-theoretic modeling at all, is that OA will inevitably win over non-OA eventually (especially once accelerated by Green OA self-archiving mandates), simply because more citations are better than fewer citations. Nothing to do with OA publishing (Gold OA) in particular, which also benefits from more citations, nor with traditional publishing, which likewise benefits from more citations….
source: Citations trump other game-theoretic incentives for OA
