It will be of interest to your readers that statistics now available for journals published in developing countries are showing a similar marked increase in usage following conversion to open-access. For example, the journals distributed by the Brazil/Canada service Bioline International show a remarkable increase in full text paper downloads, rising from an average of about 2,500 per month in 2004 to an average of 200,000 per month since the journals were made freely accessible by compliance with the Open Archives Metadata Harvesting Protocol in January 2005....It seems certain that the recovery of full papers will have a direct impact on the citation index as more data become available.
Similarly the distribution service MedKnow (see http://www.medknow.com), which manages biomedical journals in India has found that as a result of converting to open access, paper access rates have risen dramatically. The number of submissions has also grown, with an increasing number from non-Indian authors. The projected citation index has increased almost four-fold and, more importantly, the journals have been able to provide free access without charging authors or losing revenue from print subscriptions.
Although these statistics are not a comparison between the same papers available through either open- or non-open access, as in the [Eysenbach] study SciDev.Net reported on, it is certainly clear that open access is creating a remarkable and hugely encouraging growth in the use of research publications from developing countries....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/22/2006 09:51:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
