Open Access clearly means a lot of advantages from the point of view of readers: it is not necessary to pay in order to read (or download, copy, print, etc.) online documents, and thus information becomes more easily available to everyone. The question is, what can authors gain from providing this free service?
OA does not necessarily imply that authorship will not be acknowledged, therefore, in most cases, credit must be given properly to the original creator of a work. Altruistic desires aside, academics also write to get known and recognized. While they would not receive direct financial profit from their articles, there is a potential for something that might be more valuable than money: a larger audience.
Reaching such a conclusion seems logical, yet some recent investigations appear to have proven it not entirely applicable. According to a paper by the Publishing Research Consortium (2007),
there is no general Open Access citation advantage for individual authors, especially the more prolific ones. (…) citation behaviour and author attitudes to Open Access are cultural factors that differ across different fields.
There are several opinions on the matter, as the Open Citation Project (2010) claims instead that “recent studies have begun to show that open access increases impact”. At any rate, even opposers of open accessibility admit that it helps raise the amount of visitors. Paying attention to a study by the British Medical Journal (2008), which again shows that OA and non-OA scientific articles are equally cited, we will also ascertain the fact that free documents are more frequently downloaded:
Articles assigned to open access were associated with 89% more full text downloads (95% confidence interval 76% to 103%), 42% more PDF downloads (32% to 52%), and 23% more unique visitors (16% to 30%), but 24% fewer abstract downloads (−29% to −19%) than subscription access articles in the first six months after publication.
In fact, we should bear in mind that only a small portion of the public is likely to cite a work: only those readers who are also writers may leave record of the sources checked through citation. Since such academics are probably already acquainted with and registered on pay-per-view journals (which they may contribute to themselves), the result of these surveys turns out to be biased.
Because OA increases the total of downloads (which translates to the number of look-ups) so evidently, there can be no doubt that it grants authors with more visibility and spreading. In the long run, those scholars who have accumulated prestige as knowledgeable in their fields are expected to have a higher chance of being offered the best job opportunities.
References:
- The effect of open access and downloads (‘hits’) on citation impact: a bibliography of studies (October 18, 2010). In the Open Citation Project. Retrieved November 2, 2010.
- Open Access Overview (September 15, 2010). At the Earlham College, by Peter Suber. Retrieved November 1, 2010.
- Self-Archiving FAQ (2010). In Open Access and Institutional Repositories with EPrints. Retrieved November 1, 2010.
- Open access publishing, article downloads, and citations: randomised controlled trial (July 31, 2008). In the British Medical Journal (BMJ), by Philip M Davis, Bruce V Lewenstein, Daniel H Simon, James G Booth and Mathew J L Connolly. Retrieved November 2, 2010.
- Do Open Access Articles Have Greater Citation Impact? – A critical review of the literature (June 17, 2007). In Publishing Research Consortium (PRC), by Iain D Craig, Wiley-Blackwell, Andrew M Plume, Marie E McVeigh, James Pringle and Mayur Amin. Retrieved November 1, 2010.
- Parallel universes: open access and open source (February 22, 2006). In LWN. net, by Glyn Moody. Retrieved November 1, 2010.
- Access to the literature: the debate continues – The pros and cons of Open Access (September 13, 2004). In Nature – International weekly journal of science, by Kate Worlock. Retrieved November 1, 2010.
