Open Access News

Australia's research impact could be increased to oa level that would otherwise require an extra $425 million a year in funding if academics simply posted their papers on a personal or university web page rather than shelving them in a library or publishing them only in a little-read journal. Self-archiving, as proposed by Canadian academic Stevan Harnad, could bring academics and students greater exposure and more citations than through traditional publication. Harnad says the increase in impact of published research could elevate a university from a two-star ranking to five stars under the British research assessment exercise and Australia's proposed research quality framework....Harnad says even the richest university, Harvard, can afford to subscribe to only a small fraction of the 24,000 peer-reviewed journals in the world, which carry about 2.5 million articles per year. Smaller universities can afford even fewer subscriptions, so most published academic work remains unseen by most of the author's peers. "From the point of view of the author, the fact that so many potential users can't access his giveaway work is appalling," Harnad says. "There was nothing [that] could be done about this in [pre-internet] paper days; costs meant the only you could provide access was by charging a toll. This is not true any more."...Harnad says failure to self-archive costs 50 per cent of the potential citations on Australia's $1 billion research spend....Uniersity of Tasmania computer scientist Arthur Sale, who has designed software that tells authors how often and where their work is being read, says research impact could skyrocket with self-archiving. "If [the Government] contributed an extra $425 million per year for the ARC [Australian Research Council] and the NH&MRC [National lHealth and Medical Research Council], Australia's research impact as measured by citations would probably increase by about 40%....However, if it instead required a copy of all publciations derived from research funded by ARC or NHMRC grants to be deposited in an institutional repository at the time of final acceptance, Australia's research impact would rise to thoe same level. That is what taxpayers are losing annually from delay in this necessary decision." QUT [Queensland University of Technology] eprint archive project officer Paula Callan oversaw the introduction of a self-archiving policy at the university in January laast year. She says the concept was difficult to institute but, once authors saw the benefits, take-up spread. "In the feedback I've received, some expressed absolute wonder that their paper was being downloaded so often," Callan says.