Jonathan D. Wren, Open access and openly accessible: a study of scientific publications shared via the internet, BMJ, April 12, 2005. Abstract: 'Objectives: To determine how often reprints of scientific publications are shared online, whether journal readership level is a predictor, how the amount of file sharing changes with the age of the article, and to what degree open access publications are shared on non-journal websites. Design: The internet was searched using an application programming interface to Google, a popular and freely available search engine. Main outcome measures: The proportion of reprints of journal articles published between 1994 and 2004 from within 13 subscription based and four open access journals that could be located online at non-journal websites. Results: The probability that an article could be found online at a non-journal website correlated with the journal impact factor and the time since initial publication. Papers from higher impact journals and more recent articles were more likely to be located. On average, for the high impact journal articles published in 2003, over a third could be located at non-journal websites. Similar trends were observed for the delayed or full open access publications. Conclusions: Decentralised sharing of scientific reprints through the internet creates a degree of de facto open access that, though highly incomplete in its coverage, is none the less biased towards publications of higher popular demand.'
(PS: Wren's question is interesting and important, and I trust his results as far as they go. But we should beware of concluding that most high-demand or high-quality articles already exist in some OA form, or that high-impact leads to OA more than the reverse. I'm not saying that Wren himself makes these mistakes. On the first: many articles are not self-archived because their authors are unfamiliar with the process or too busy, variables entirely independent of the article's demand or quality. On the second: many archived articles may be highly cited because they are OA, not vice versa. To supplement Wren from this point of view, see the evidence that OA increases citation impact.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/13/2005 01:38:00 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.
