Reposted [by S.H.] from Open Access News
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_06_20_fosblogarchive.html#a108786958702922366
New data showing that OA increases impact
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june04/harnad/06harnad.html
Stevan Harnad and Tim Brody, Comparing the Impact of Open Access
(OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals, D-Lib Magazine, June
2004. Excerpt:
"The way to test the impact advantage of Open Access (OA) is not to
compare the citation impact factors of OA and non-OA journals but
to compare the citation counts of individual OA and non-OA articles
appearing in the same (non-OA) journals. Such ongoing comparisons
are revealing dramatic citation advantages for OA....The earlier
Lawrence (2001) study on the impact-enhancing effects of OA in
computer science needed to be replicated in other fields to check
whether it was merely an artifact of the fact that computer science is
conference-based rather than journal-based, and whether the advantage
really reflected OA vs. non-OA rather than just online access
vs. paper access. Fortunately, thanks to the ISI database licensed
to the Observatoire des Sciences et des Technologies (OST) and a
special contract generously provided by ISI to conduct the study,
our research team at the Université du Québec à Montréal, Southampton
University and Universität Oldenburg is in the process of testing
the OA advantage across all disciplines in a 10-year ISI sample
of 14 million articles. The physics analyses up to 2001 are already
completed (Brody et al. 2004),
http://opcit.eprints.org/feb19prog.html
and they reveal even larger effects than those reported by Lawrence,
with OA/non-OA citation ratios of 2.5 - 5.8."
(PS: This is an important article. It's the first major study
since the famous Lawrence paper documenting the proposition that OA
increases impact. It's also the first to go beyond Lawrence in scope
and method in order to answer doubts raised about his thesis. By
confirming that OA increases impact, it gives authors the best of
reasons to provide OA to their own work.)
Originally posted by Peter Suber at 9:43 PM, Monday June 21 2004
Received on Tue Jun 22 2004 - 12:02:04 BST