Terry Anderson, Open Access in Action!International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, June 2006. An editorial. Excerpt:
Mid 2006 finds the academic research community engaged in an ideological and fiscal war related to Open Access publishing. Open Access requires that the full text of publications be made available at no cost to anyone on the open Internet. Recent position and discussion papers in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries, have called for dialogue amongst academics and strongly hinted that research supported by public funds should be made available freely to the general public. The resulting discussion has clearly split the academic community....
IRRODL’s position is, as expected, to be solidly behind all moves to insure Open Access publication. We are proudly listed with the 2,256 other journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals and our publisher, Athabasca University, is a signature to the Budapest Open Access Initiative....From six years of producing IRRODL, we know that editing and reviewing are non-trivial tasks that take time, skill, and creative energy, and we certainly do not subscribe to any notion that devalues this contribution to scholarly life....
I recently performed a quick experiment using Google Scholar to compare the number of citations of articles in five of the most popular distance education related journals. The method by which Goggle spiders find articles is quite obscure, so there is no way of telling if the engine itself has systemic bias. Nonetheless, I counted the average number of citations for the ten most popular articles published by these journals in the past 5 years....The data...shows that the two Open Access journals have higher number of citations than all but the American Journal of Distance Education. Given the wider circulation and much smaller number of articles published in the American Journal of Distance Education, it is perhaps not surprising that they have relatively high citation ratings as well. However, clearly the Open Access journals have (on average) greater number of citations and impact than closed publications. The point I draw from this is that authors wishing to maximize the impact of their research in our field are advised to select Open Access outlets.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/16/2006 01:11:00 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.
