Legal Research

Trees Falling in Forests

ResourceShelf pointed to this today and it's quite an interesting statistic...

Open Access to Scientific Papers May Not Guarantee Wide Dissemination
"New research challenges assumption that having research published in open access journals and other free sources leads to more exposure and citations"

Here's the soundbite:

"The results were surprising. On average, when a given publication was made available online after being in print for a year, being published in an open source format increased the use of that article by about 8 percent. When articles are made available online in a commercial format a year after publication, however, usage increases by about 12 percent.

"Across the scientific community," Evans said in an interview, "it turns out that open access does have a positive impact on the attention that's given to the journal articles, but it's a small impact."

Now this is a bit of a grenade in the OA community and will get debated a lot. Since some of the fervour verges on religious belief it'll be fun to watch the twists and turns.

Again, we need to be careful when the more doctrinaire among us advocate for a single way. The hybrid solution seems to be the one that gets the results. It's not just about ownership, format and rights. It's about whether your research gets read and used and has a positive impact.

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on February 20, 2009 (boomark / email).