As part of a larger study of the citation advantage of Open Access (OA) , a study was mounted to see whether a higher proportion of citations to OA articles came from authors based in countries where funds for the purchase of journals were short. Mathematics was chosen as the field to be studied, because no special programme for access in developing countries, such as HINARI, covers it. The results showed that the majority of citations were given by Americans to Americans, but the admittedly small number of citations from authors in developing countries do indeed seem to show a higher proportion of citations being given to OA articles than is the case for citations from developed countries....
One of the basic arguments for OA is that those who cannot afford access to peer-reviewed journal articles could do so if the authors of these articles self-archived their work somewhere on the World Wide Web. It should follow then that a higher percentage of those who cite these OA articles ought to come from countries where access to expensive journals is limited....
For TA articles, the highest ratio of citing to cited articles occurs for citing authors in those countries in the lower middle income bracket, regardless of the nationality of origin of the cited articles. If all but the high income level countries are taken together, then the citation ratio is 4.45 for the TA articles and 9.79 for the OA articles. However, the overwhelming majority of articles are both authored and cited from the high-income countries....
The USA cites itself more than anyone else, which is not surprising given its level of authorship. The other developed countries except for Japan are all at about the same level in terms of within-nation citation. Table 1 suggests that while there is modest difference between the citation ratios of OA and TA articles for citations given by authors in the developed world (3.84 versus 2.92), the difference becomes much greater when citations given by authors from the developing world are studied. The sample from the lowest income countries is very small, but the results from the larger sample in the lower middle income group of countries are striking: a citation ratio of 12.85 for OA articles versus 5.05 for TA articles.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/15/2008 02:17:00 PM.
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.
