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

[Philip Davis]

Published today in The FASEB Journal, we report the findings of our randomized controlled trial of open access publishing on article downloads and citations. This study extends a prior study of 11 journals in physiology (Davis et al, BMJ, 2008) reported at 12months to 36 journals covering the sciences, social sciences and humanities at 3yrs. Our initial results are generalizable across all subject disciplines: open access increases article downloads but has no effect on article citations.  The article is freely-available from the link below. You may expect a routine cut-and-paste reply by S.H. shortly.


Open access, readership, citations: a randomized controlled trial of scientific journal publishing
The FASEB Journal
http://www.fasebj.org/content/early/2011/03/29/fj.11-183988.abstract

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.


Philip Davis
Department of Communication
Cornell University
pmd8 at cornell.edu
607 255-2124
https://confluence.cornell.edu/display/~pmd8/resume
http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/author/pmd8/



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