Also reported at the conference was perhaps the first study to show direct benefits to a biomedical journal of making its contents freely available online. Dev Kumar R. Sahu, the managing editor of the Journal of Postgraduate Medicine, a quarterly journal published in India, said that going online and making its contents free in 2001 vastly increased the visibility and impact of the journal. (The journal is under no pressure to break even; the hospital that runs it, the King Edward Memorial Hospital, in Mumbai, pays for its operations.) The journal has a print circulation of about 400, and publishes only about 50 papers yearly. Now that it is online and free, the journal receives some 75,000 unique visitors to its Web site every month, 2,000 of whom download research papers. The number of manuscripts submitted for publication has increased fivefold, Dr. Sahu said. Dr. Sahu also looked at other journals' citations of papers published in the Journal of Postgraduate Medicine from 1990 to 1999. He compared citations of those papers before the journal went online in 2001 with citations published from 2001 to 2004. The number of citations is generally considered to reflect a paper's impact on other researchers' work. Of 893 citations, more than 60 percent came in the three years after the journal opened access. When Dr. Sahu surveyed authors who had cited the papers, about two-thirds of the 312 responders said they used the journal online and less than 5 percent said they would have been willing to pay for access. Pritpal S. Tamber, the editorial director for medicine at BioMed Central, a large open-access publisher, said he knew of no other journals that had collected data showing that opening access increased visibility. "The future of open access is to find people like D.K. Sahu," he said.
(PS: The conference presentations are not yet online.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/19/2005 07:35:00 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.
