Do Open-Access Articles Have a Greater Research Impact?

[Stevan Harnad]

On Tue, 28 Sep 2004, Sloan, Bernie wrote:

> Antelman, Kristen. Do Open-Access Articles Have a Greater Research
> Impact? College and Research Libraries, 65(5), 372-382. September 2004.
>
> The finding is that, across all four disciplines [philosophy, political science,
> electrical and electronic engineering and mathematics], freely available
> articles do have a greater research impact... scholars in diverse disciplines
> are adopting open-access practices and being rewarded for it.

For further evidence, see Steve Hitchcock's bibliography at:

    http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html

For further data on the OA impact advantage, see:

Brody, T. & Harnad, S. (2004, in prep.) Earlier Web Usage Statistics as Predictors
of Later Citation Impact. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/timcorr.doc

Harnad, S. & Brody, T. (2004) Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA
Articles in the Same Journals, D-Lib Magazine 10 (6) June
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june04/harnad/06harnad.html

Harnad, S. and Brody, T. (2004) Prior evidence that downloads predict citations
BMJ Rapid Responses, 6 September 2004
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/eletters/329/7465/546#73000

Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y,
Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The Access/Impact Problem and
the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access. Serials Review 30.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/impact.html
Shorter version: The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus.
http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html

Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs
Linked to University Eprint Archives: Improving the UK Research Assessment
Exercise whilst making it cheaper and easier. Ariadne 35 (April 2003).
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/harnad/

Hitchcock, S., Woukeu, A., Brody, T., Carr, L., Hall, W., and Harnad, S. (2003)
Evaluating Citebase, an open access Web-based citation-ranked search and impact
discovery service.
http://opcit.eprints.org/evaluation/Citebase-evaluation/evaluation-report.html

Kurtz, Michael J.; Eichhorn, Guenther; Accomazzi, Alberto; Grant, Carolyn S.;
Demleitner, Markus; Murray, Stephen S.; Martimbeau, Nathalie; Elwell, Barbara.
(2004a) Worldwide Use and Impact of the NASA Astrophysics Data System Digital
Library. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
55.
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~kurtz/jasist1.pdfhttp://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~kurtz/jasist1.pdf

Kurtz, Michael J.; Eichhorn, Guenther; Accomazzi, Alberto; Grant, Carolyn S.;
Demleitner, Markus; Murray, Stephen S.; Martimbeau, Nathalie ; Elwell, Barbara
(2004b) The Bibliometric Properties of Article Readership Information. Journal of
the American Society for Information Science and Technology 55.
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~kurtz/jasist2.pdf

Lawrence, S. (2001) Online or Invisible? Nature 411 (6837): 521.
http://www.neci.nec.com/~lawrence/papers/online-nature01/

Odlyzko, A.M. (2002) The rapid evolution of scholarly communication." Learned
Publishing 15: 7-19 http://www.catchword.com/alpsp/09531513/v15n1/contp1-1.htm

Perneger, T.V. (2004) Relation between online "hit counts" and subsequent
citations: prospective study of research papers in the BMJ. BMJ 2004;329:546-547
(4 September), doi:10.1136/bmj.329.7465.546
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/329/7465/546

Smith, A. & Eysenck, M. (2002) The correlation between RAE ratings and citation
counts in psychology. Technical Report, Psychology, University of London, Royal
Holloway. http://psyserver.pc.rhbnc.ac.uk/citations.pdf

Swan, A. & Brown, S.N. (2004a) JISC/OSI Journal Authors Survey Report.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/JISCOAreport1.pdf
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3628.html
Swan, A. & Brown, S.N. (2004b) Authors and open access publishing. Learned
Publishing 2004:17(3) 219-224.
http://www.ingentaselect.com/rpsv/cw/alpsp/09531513/v17n3/s7/