Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Monday, March 30, 2009

Assessing and enhancing the impact of your research

The Becker Medical Library at Washington University has launched a set of 10+ web pages on Assessing the Impact of Research.

From the about page:

The Becker Medical Library Model for Assessment of Research Impact model represents a practical, do-it-yourself tool for tracking the impact of biomedical research. The Model includes guidance for quantifying and documenting research impact as well as resources for locating evidence of research impact....

From the page of Strategies for Enhancing the Impact of Research:

Improving access and retrieval of your research study is the surest way to enhancing its impact....

7. Submit the manuscript to [an OA] digital subject repository. One example is arXiv which is an e-print service hosted by Cornell University in the fields of physics and mathematics. PubMed Central is another example of a digital subject repository. Investigators whose research was funded by NIH, Autism Speaks or the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) are required to submit their manuscripts if funded by one of these organizations.

8.  Submit the manuscript to an institutional repository such as DSpace@WUSM.

9.  Retain rights to manuscripts that allow for maximum flexibility to re-use the work....(If the right to post a manuscript on an institutional or laboratory website cannot be obtained, create links to the manuscript from your website using the PMID from a PubMed citation or persistent URLs/DOIs that link directly to the publisher’s website. Check with the library staff of the affiliate organization for more information on how to create links to content).

12.  Publish your work in an open access journal. Open access journals allow authors to retain rights to the manuscript to allow for many options for dissemination of the research. Open access articles often garner greater impact than traditional models of publication. See: “The effect of open access and downloads (‘hits’) on citation impact: a bibliography of studies.” ...

Comment.  This is a useful project, well-executed.  Note that some of the strategies are general, and would apply in other fields, but many are field-specific.  Others may want to create similar guides for other fields.