Studies Suggest Open Access Leads to More Citations
Posted by David Bruggeman on February 25, 2009
The Scientist reports on a recent study (registration required) that suggests that open access journal articles will receive more citations than articles not available through open access. Before you consign this to the dustbin of the obvious, not all studies have indicated such a correlation. But the study at the focus of this article covered 26 million articles from 8 thousand journals over the course of seven years. This comprehensive study noted an overall increase in citations of 8 percent, but significant variation across fields and countries. Open access leads to much higher increases in citations in poorer countries, and fields with a culture of pre-print databases and personal archives did not show as high an increase in citations compared to fields like the biomedical sciences. Expect this study to show up in future fights over the NIH open access requirements.
This entry was posted on February 25, 2009 at 18:42 and is filed under Author: Bruggeman, D., Democratization of Knowledge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Impact of Open Access on Citations Still Mixed « Pasco Phronesis said
[...] open access articles compared to traditional subscription based articles. This runs counter to other studies that suggest open access articles do see higher citation rates. But a mixed record of citation impacts should be [...]