I spent the day today at the AAAS meeting at the Hynes Convention Center and sat in on sessions ranging from open access to science blogging to nuclear reactors and national science policy: even folks from the Hillary and Obama camps turned up to deliver their candidates’ science positions and to answer questions. In other words, it was great fun for someone like me, a journalist interested in not just science but also the issues surrounding it: policy, communication, education and the societal impacts. Here’s a quick roundup of what I saw today.

Open access: I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s getting tired of all the rhetoric, conjecture and emotion in the open access debate. Where’s the data to back up or weaken arguments on either side? This morning I heard a talk that did give some data. Phil Davis, a graduate student at Cornell (and a former librarian) talked about whether open access articles are cited and downloaded more than ones behind a subscription wall. He actually gave some data from a randomized control trial. If you can use that approach to study drugs or other medical interventions, why not open access? I thought it was clever way to cut through the OA rhetoric.

He worked with 12 journals published by the American Physiological Society to randomly assign about 1600 articles those journals were publishing to either an OA journal or a subscription based one. (Some of the APS journals were ‘converted’ to an OA model for this experiment). He then followed those papers over time, analyzing the number of clicks on the full-text HTML version, PDF downloads and citations. He even took into account possible confounding factors affecting readership, such as the number of authors (papers with long author lists get cited more) and whether the paper was publicized in a press release.

The results: OA articles (full-text) got more online views and were downloaded more as PDFs than nonOA articles, although the views increased more than PDF downloads. He also found that there were other factors that seemed to independently increase PDF downloads more: being cited in a review article, being press released, and being on the cover of the journal.

It gets more interesting: when he did the citation analysis, he found that OA articles were not cited more often 8 to 12 months post publication than non-OA articles.

What’s happening here? Davis speculated that most people who download such articles probably already have access via subscriptions and so don’t need and don’t cite OA articles. The higher jump in views among OA articles could be a result of people from the developing world and just casual browsers, he added. Davis said he was working to replicate his results in journals from other fields.

Later in the day, I found myself in a room packed full of people eager to hear from the science and tech advisors to Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama (reps of the Republican candidates were apparently invited, but none showed up). I couldn’t help but notice how the contrast between the two advisers seemed to reflect a key difference between the two candidates. Tom Kalil from the Clinton camp was an advisor to Bill Clinton and is the Special Assistant to the Chancellor for Science and Technology at UC Berkeley. From the Obama side, Alec Ross looked to me to be in his 30s and is the cofounder and a vice-president of a nonprofit that brings technology and broadband to low-income people.

They ran through their candidates’ science platforms (Clinton’s and Obama’s technology position and energy/environment stand), which sounded to me to be fairly similar at a high level, such as large increases to the science budgets of national funding agencies like the NIH and NSF. Both emphasized their desire to take political interference out of science policymaking and ended on a call to scientists to become more politically organized and engaged.

To read about some of the other sessions at AAAS, have a look at what my other Nature colleagues have been blogging here.