Blog of Random Thoughts and Pictures

Can open access lead to wide dissemination impact

February 22nd, 2009

According to the results from research carried out at the University of Chicago, by James Evans and Jacob Reimer on Open Access and Global Participation in Science the answer is No for the 1st world and Yes for the developing world.
It is being reported that they found that on average when a publication was made available online in an open source format, it increased the citations of that article by about 8 percent but when articles are made available online in a commercial format citations increase by about 12 percent.. A situation which reverses for poor countries where open access articles are much more likely to be cited.
Further insight from one of the authors, James Evans is in this video below :

I’ve been thinking about this and what if you could have the best of both worlds Open Access in a Commercial Journal and then I came across Springer Open Choice, which seems to allow for articles to be distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License. I see this used to full effect by authors in this Springer Mobile Networks and Applications Journal: Special Issue on Cognitive Radio Oriented Wireless Networks and Communications.
Which leads me to sign off on this topic with a pointer to GPeerReview, which is a (CLI) tool that allows peers to review articles and then to sign that review …. which is interesting.