Open Access News

The open access citation advantage has been amply demonstrated in many studies, which can be found through Steve Hitchcock's excellent bibliography....With universities and countries proceeding towards open access at different paces, here is an hypothesis which anyone interested in invited to test: There will be a strong positive correlation between open access and organizational impact....Organizational impact can be measured through such means as success at obtaining funding grants (whether measured by number or amount of grants), success at attracting top students (perhaps measured through traditional evaluation criteria by which students are considered for competitive programs), graduate student success, success at obtaining operational or capital funding through public or private sources, academic awards, student success in the workplace, and so forth....[Researchers who provide OA to their own work may find it easier to get grants from agencies that provide OA to the results of the research they fund.]...Top students are more likely to be attracted to a university with a strong open access mandate for two reasons. First, they are more likely to encounter the research published by the university's researchers and thus become interested in the university. Second, the university's researchers will benefit from the open access citation advantage - their work will be cited more often, and hence will be more obviously valued by the scholarly community. Good matches between graduate students and supervisors would appear to have some relation with common research interests - the more students who have access to our work, the better the chances that the grad student who would be a really good match will find us. A university that makes its work available to the world through an institutional repository is a resource for the community. Local media will find it easy to write about the university, and find local experts to interview. It makes sense that this would enhance the value of the university to the community, which in theory should help universities in their funding efforts....The real competition of the educational sector is not the other institutions - it is ignorance.