The results are coming in about the impact of open access (OA) on research citations.

OA articles are freely available on the web, so that a search on Google Scholar will bring up the full text instead of a publisher’s page that demands payment before you can read it.

A ten-year research study now under way suggests that an OA article may be cited far more often than an article in the same journal that has not been posted on the web by its author.

Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals.

This is such a fundamental issue for policy analysis. I’ve been frustrated yet again this week by trying to track down an article that is not available on the web, nor even in the York University online library. Apparently it’s available in University of Toronto’s online library but I have no access to it. As a result, this article will have no influence on policy. And researchers wonder why no-one listens to them!

Most scholarly journals now permit authors to self-archive their articles on the web either before or after publication. Many funders of research are beginning to demand that their researchers self-archive, or publish in open access journals, as a way to increase the impact of the findings. Given that publication is a small proportion of the cost of doing research, and most of the research is funded by public money, it seems obvious to get the information out to the public.