Abstract: There have been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of studies of journal reading by professionals in such fields as science, engineering, medicine, law, social science and the humanities. These studies have been done for many reasons, including research to better understand professional communication patterns and the role this plays in their work. Some studies also focus on providing specific information to journal system participants such as publishers, librarians, other intermediaries and their funders. In this article we present a description of a little used but powerful method of observing reading by scientists. This method is designed to measure the amount of reading of specific journal articles and entire journals to complement exclusive observations of electronic journal hits and downloads, transaction logs, limited counts of citations to journals or articles and rough estimates of total amount of reading by professionals compared with total number of articles published.
From the body of the paper:
Results of the analysis in this article show that surveys involving amount of reading from Table-of-Contents complement other estimates of amount of reading of articles and journals, and overcome their flaws. However, with recent open access concerns with cost of publishing articles, this method provides a more accurate means of estimating the article (and journal) cost per reading. This information is important to publishers, libraries and their funders....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/16/2006 07:06:00 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.
