Stevan Harnad, Open Access to Peer-Reviewed Research through Author/Institution Self-Archiving: Maximizing Research Impact by Maximizing Online Access, Journal of Postgraduate Medicine, 49, 4 (2003) pp. 337-342. Excerpt: The beneficiaries [of OA archiving] will not just be research and researchers, but society itself, inasmuch as research is supported because of its potential benefits to society. Researchers in developing countries and at the less affluent universities and research institutions of the developed countries will benefit even more from toll-free access to the research literature than the better-off institutions, but it is instructive to remind ourselves that even the most affluent institutional libraries cannot afford most of the refereed journals! So open access to it all will benefit all institutions. And on the other side of barrier-free access to the work of others, all researchers, even the most affluent, will benefit from the barrier-free impact of their own work on the work of others. Moreover, a toll-free, interoperable, digital research literature will not only radically enhance access, navigation (e.g., citation-linking) and impact, and thereby improve research productivity and quality, but it will also spawn new ways of monitoring and measuring impact, productivity and quality (e.g., download impact, links, immediacy, comments, and the higher-order dynamics of a citation-linked corpus) that can be analyzed from preprint to post-postprint."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/05/2004 09:44:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
