Open access readership citations a randomized controlled trial…

Open access, readership, citations: a randomized controlled trial of scientific journal publishing :

“Does free access to journal articles result in greater diffusion of scientific knowledge? Using a randomized controlled trial of open access publishing, involving 36 participating journals in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, we report on the effects of free access on article downloads and citations. Articles placed in the open access condition (n=712) received significantly more downloads and reached a broader audience within the first year, yet were cited no more frequently, nor earlier, than subscription-access control articles (n=2533) within 3 yr. These results may be explained by social stratification, a process that concentrates scientific authors at a small number of elite research universities with excellent access to the scientific literature. The real beneficiaries of open access publishing may not be the research community but communities of practice that consume, but rarely contribute to, the corpus of literature.—Davis, P. M. Open access, readership, citations: a randomized controlled trial of scientific journal publishing.”

URL : http://www.fasebj.org/content/early/2011/03/29/fj.11-183988.abstract

Citation Advantage of Open Access Legal Scholarship …

Citation Advantage of Open Access Legal Scholarship :

“To date, there have been no studies focusing exclusively on the impact of open access on legal scholarship. We examine open access articles from three journals at the University of Georgia School of Law and confirm that legal scholarship freely available via open access improves an article’s research impact. Open access legal scholarship – which today appears to account for almost half of the output of law faculties – can expect to receive 50% more citations than non-open access writings of similar age from the same venue.”

URL : http://works.bepress.com/james_donovan/64/

Support for gold open access publishing …

Support for gold open access publishing strategies at QUT :

INTRODUCTION : Since the introduction of its QUT ePrints institutional repository of published research outputs, together with the world’s first mandate for author contributions to an institutional repository, Queensland University of Technology (QUT) has been a leader in support of green road open access. With QUT ePrints providing our mechanism for supporting the green road to open access, QUT has since then also continued to expand its secondary open access strategy supporting gold road open access, which is also designed to assist QUT researchers to maximise the accessibility and so impact of their research.

METHODS : QUT Library has adopted the position of selectively supporting true gold road open access publishing by using the Library Resource Allocation budget to pay the author publication fees for QUT authors wishing to publish in the open access journals of a range of publishers including BioMed Central, Public Library of Science and Hindawi. QUT Library has been careful to support only true open access publishers and not those open access publishers with hybrid models which “double dip” by charging authors publication fees and libraries subscription fees for the same journal content. QUT Library has maintained a watch on the growing number of open access journals available from gold road open access publishers and their increased rate of success as measured by publication impact.

RESULTS : This paper reports on the successes and challenges of QUT’s efforts to support true gold road open access publishers and promote these publishing strategy options to researchers at QUT. The number and spread of QUT papers submitted and published in the journals of each publisher is provided. Citation counts for papers and authors are also presented and analysed, with the intention of identifying the benefits to accessibility and research impact for early career and established researchers.

CONCLUSIONS : QUT Library is eager to continue and further develop support for this publishing strategy, and makes a number of recommendations to other research institutions, on how they can best achieve success with this strategy.”

URL : http://eprints.qut.edu.au/39416/

Creating and Curating the Cognitive Comm…

Creating and Curating the Cognitive Commons: Southampton’s Contribution :

“The Web is becoming humankind’s Cognitive Commons, where knowledge is created and curated collaboratively. We trace its origins from the advent of language around 300,000 years ago to a recent series of milestones to which the University of Southampton has contributed, helping Open Access (OA) Institutional Repositories (IRs), OA IR contents, and OA mandates to grow through the posting of the Subversive Proposal in 1994, the creation of CogPrints in 1997, the OpCit citation-linking project in 1999, the creation of the Eprints IR software in 2000, the Citebase citation-linking engine in 2001, the ROAR repository in 2002, the adoption and promotion of OA mandates (beginning with the ECS Southampton mandate, the world’s first, in 2002), the creation or the ROARMAP mandates registry in 2003, and the ongoing bibliography of the Open Access Impact Advantage since 2004.”

URL : http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21844/

Open Access: Making Science Research Acc…

Open Access: Making Science Research Accessible :

“Even as the government makes huge investments in science and technology, research publications produced by Indian institutions are not easily available or accessible, thus undermining the visibility and ranking of these institutions. The adoption of an open access policy can close the gap between research outcomes and their dissemination. Expanding access to publicly-funded scientific research through open access has the potential to spur innovation and lead to a growth in patentable discoveries and their commercial applications.”

URL : http://beta.epw.in/static_media/PDF/archives_pdf/2010/11/C112010_Open_Access_S_Gutam,_G_Aneeja.pdf

THE IMPACT OF OPEN ACCESS OUTSIDE EUROPE…

THE IMPACT OF OPEN ACCESS OUTSIDE EUROPEAN UNIVERSITIES :

The Open Access movement has encouraged the availability of publicly-funded research papers, data and learning content for barrier-free use of that content without payment by the user. The impact of increasing availability of content to researchers in European universities is understood in terms of easier access to previous research and greater exposure for new research results, bringing benefits to the research community itself. A new culture of informal sharing is evident within the teaching and learning communities and to some extent also within the research community, but as yet the growth in informal sharing has not had a major effect upon the use of formal publication choices.

This briefing paper explores the impact of open access upon potential users of research outputs outside the walls of research-led European universities, where the economic value of open access may be even greater than the academic value within universities. The potential impact of open access is understood in many communities but requires a greater volume of open access content to be available for the full potential to be realised. More open access content will become available as the opportunities in open, internet-based digital scholarship are understood.

URL : http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/Default.aspx?ID=412

Improving the Value of Transport Researc…

Improving the Value of Transport Research using Advanced Web Tools to Improve Research Dissemination :

“This paper aims to measure the impact of a thematic digital research repository on spreading new knowledge research into the professional transport community using user survey findings for the SORT (Social Research in Transport) Clearinghouse (www.sortclearinghouse.info) website and a review of previous research.

Research dissemination, the circulation of research findings, has been identified as the easiest way to distribute new knowledge and thematic research clearinghouses such as SORT have been seen as a means to „reinvigorate professional values‟ by providing quick access to quality research whilst also maintaining copyright protections to authors and publishers. SORT was developed out of the concern that social research findings in transport were not reaching the wider non-academic professional community. Some 1,777 separate users from 69 countries accessed the site on 3,282 visits in the first 11 months of 2009 for an average visit length of 5 minutes.

The user survey of SORT identified that policy/practitioners and consultants were the primary users of the web site (66%) with academics (27%). Most site users apply the research content accessed from SORT for „conceptual‟ applications (i.e. to keep informed). A very high share of users cite research evidence in their own published work (27% of academics) supporting previous research suggesting that research clearinghouses add much value to authors, journal editors and publishers. „Instrumental‟ use of research (to implement a transport plan, policy or service) represented a minority of uses (20% on average) nevertheless this is considered quite a reasonable outcome from a targeted dissemination approach. Some 40% of policy/practitioners used the research from SORT for „instrumental‟ purposes and this group represents half of the user base suggesting a strong real world application of the
research content in SORT. Support for this conclusion is provided from user ratings of the importance
of SORT to user occupational activities. Overall 56% of all users (65% of professional/practitioners)
considered SORT essential/very essential to their work.

Overall the findings provide some strong support for the view that thematic research clearinghouses might have an important role to play in bridging the gap between quality academic research published in research journals and professional practitioners planning and operating transport systems.”

URL : http://www.civil.ist.utl.pt/wctr12_lisboa/WCTR_General/documents/01342.pdf