... This article describes a study, involving a set of articles published in scholarly journals by faculty members of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) that have also been deposited in the HKUST Institutional Repository. The study was conducted to measure the actual effect of their open accessibility on citation rates. ...
A total of 50 archived journal articles that already have 10 or more citation counts in Scopus were randomly selected for inclusion in this study. ...
Each "full item record" in the Repository includes fields on "date.accessioned" and "date.available" which help to ascertain when a full-text journal article was actually added to the Repository and made openly accessible. Elsevier's Scopus database was then searched to get the citation counts of these 50 articles in each of the years since they were published, including the years after these articles were deposited in the HKUST IR. ...
The absolute citation counts were used to derive two average-per-year citation counts, before and after the articles are made openly accessible through the IR. ...
Of the 50 articles included in the study, 29 (or 58%) have had a higher average-citation-rate after they have been deposited in the IR and made openly accessible than they had prior to being available in the IR. The rest of the open access articles, or 42 %, have not yet experienced a similar increase in the average-citation-rate. ...
Much bigger increases for some articles suggest that the subject areas of these articles matter to a large extent. For instance, a number of articles in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in this study stand out in particular. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 11/17/2009 04:16:00 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.
