Re: Higher rate of citation

From: Andrew Odlyzko <odlyzko_at_DTC.UMN.EDU>
Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2002 19:15:09 -0600

    On Fri, 29 Nov 2002, Jim Till wrote:

        On Fri, 29 Nov 2002, Jan Velterop wrote [in part, on the
        Subject: Re: UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) review]:

>jv> Little wonder that scientists are often not aware of the issues of
>jv> serials crises and open access solutions. If they were, many would
>jv> be likely to take an attitude to publishing their research that is
>jv> similar to their attitude towards scientific problems: experiment
>jv> and 'push the envelope'. The theory and the hypotheses are clear.
>jv> And experimental results are now, slowly but steadily, becoming
>jv> available, such as a generally higher rate of citation for articles
>jv> that are freely accessible to anyone.

        Is there an (openly-accessible) summary of the evidence that supports the
        hypothesis that openly-accessible research reports generally (i.e. in
        several quite different disciplines) attract higher citation rates?

        If such a summary exists, I'd like to know about it. It would be helpful
        to me in my local OA (and FOS) advocacy efforts.

        Jim Till
        University of Toronto


The standard reference now (hopefully to be joined by many others in
the future) is the work of Steve Lawrence at NEC Research in Princeton,

Online or invisible? Nature, vol. 411 (no. 6837), p. 521. Self-archived
preprint available at <http://www.neci.nec.com/~lawrence/papers/online-nature01/>.

and

Free online availability substantially increases a paper's impact, in
Nature Web forum, "Future e-access to the primary literature," 2001,
<http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/lawrence.html>.

Andrew
Received on Sat Nov 30 2002 - 01:15:09 GMT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Dec 10 2010 - 19:46:44 GMT