Tim Brody, Citation Analysis in the Open Access World, a preprint forthcoming from Interactive Media International. Excerpt: "OA is now firmly on the agenda for funding agencies, universities, libraries and publishers. What is needed now is objective, quantitative evidence of the benefits of OA to authors to researchers, their institutions, their funders and to research itself. Web-based analysis of usage and citation patterns is providing this evidence. One of the many misconceptions about the OA debate is that it is primarily about economics. Although the journal pricing/affordability problem certainly helped draw attention to OA, it has now become a distraction from the deeper problem: the research access/impact problem....[E]very potential user that an article loses is lost potential impact for its author, its author's institution, its research-funder, and for research itself....[Summarizing the data:] Articles with OA versions consistently receive more citations than those that do not. This OA advantage is biggest within the year before and the two years after an article is published (an early-access pre-print advantage followed by a new-article post-print advantage), but older OA articles also continue to be cited more in these fields."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/06/2004 05:59:00 PM.
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.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
