Doug Gaffin
February 1, 2023
Doug Gaffin is Professor Emeritus of Biology at OU. He has served as Dean of University College and Interim Dean of the Honors College. Dr. Gaffin studies scorpion sensory biology, with a focus on navigation. He is extremely proud of the many undergraduates who have worked in his research laboratory, over twenty of which became authors on published papers before they graduated from OU. Visit his website at http://scorpionlab.douglasgaffin.com/.
Dr. Gaffin has received the David Ross Boyd Professorship, the Regents’ Award for Superior Teaching, and the Outstanding Freshman Advocate Award from the National Center for the First-Year Experience. He loves volleyball, camping, playing the banjo, and hanging out with his wonderful wife Dr. Mariëlle Hoefnagels.
Dr. Gaffin is also a four-time recipient of OU’s subvention funding to help support the open publication of his research, including his recent articles “Synaptic Interactions in Scorpion Peg Sensilla Appear to Maintain Chemosensory Neurons within Dynamic Firing Range” and “Evidence of Learning Walks Related to Scorpion Home Burrow Navigation.”
Could you tell us about the professional connections your “Evidence of learning walks related to scorpion home burrow navigation” article, recently published open access in the Journal of Experimental Biology, has helped you make?
The best example I can give is an email I received soon after the article appeared. It came from arguably the most renowned scientist in my field (neuroethology). I will leave the person’s name out, but I have followed and admired this person’s works since graduate school. The email starts:
“With great fascination I read your recent JEB article on homing walks in Paruroctonus scorpions. I very much like the way by which you address the scorpion's homing task.”
The email continued with several paragraphs of ideas for further experiments. I replied with some thoughts of my own and have received additional correspondence. I am currently in the process of drawing up a protocol to test some of the ideas we discussed in the exchanges. I feel the article’s open access helped our work get noticed and facilitated this important connection.
When you consider the impact of that article, especially in relation to the other articles in that particular journal issue, what are your key impressions as we approach the end of 2022?
To answer this, I did some analysis. I looked at the total views for each article in the journal’s issue as of October 17, 2022 (114 days after the article first appeared). Of the 18 articles in the issue, ours was the only one with full open access. The top chart at right (A) shows the number of views for each article in order of their placement on the journal’s website. As you can see, our scorpion article (red bar) was the eighth article in the issue but was the most highly viewed. Five of the articles in the issue were selected as featured articles with a small blurb about each at the top of the website. I suspected this added exposure may account for the numerous views of our article, so I ranked the articles by number of views (chart B) and indicated the order of placement of the five featured articles with numbers atop the bars. Our article was placed second in the featured list yet was viewed over three times more than the first featured article. The third chart (C) shows the average views of all the articles and just the featured articles (+SE) compared to our scorpion article. I divided the total views for our article by the average views of the non-open access articles in the issue and got a relative citation rate of open access vs non-open access of 4.9 for our article. This number is in line with an analysis published in the journal eLIFE that compared open access to non-open access articles for various disciplines. In fact, I was encouraged to see that our 4.9 rate was considerably higher than the rate for other biology articles monitored in the eLIFE article. To sum up, my impressions as of October 17 were very good – that open access was having a great positive effect on our paper’s exposure.
Have you seen a difference in the citation rate between your open access work and your paywalled work?
I have not formally tracked the metrics for my previous work, including my paywalled work. However, I have noticed that my h-index is rising some. It takes a while for these measures to change, but it seems correlated with my increased publishing in open access venues.
Why do you choose to publish open access?
I choose to publish open access for two main reasons. First, from my experience, open access has increased the visibility of our published work. Second, and more importantly, I think open access helps level the field for those without resources to access crucial scientific information.
Would you encourage others to publish open access? If so, why?
Yes, I would, especially since the library and offices of the Vice President for Research and Partnerships and Provost have been so generous and accommodating with grants to offset the publication costs. I think it is especially important for early career researchers to get their work out and noticed and my personal experience suggests that open access publications can help with this.