Re: Open Access Advantage (or Not!)

[Phil Davis <pmd8@cornell.edu>]

Jan,

Your opening paragraph leads me to believe that there is an ideal 
study that will put to rest whether providing free issues in a 
traditional fee-based journal leads to 1) higher downloads and 2) 
more citations.  Can you provide more details on which publishers 
you mean?  If provided with the data, I would be happy to take 
this research on for the benefit of publishers, librarians and 
the public.  Questions like this deserve to go beyond mere 
speculation.

--Phil Davis

At 07:48 PM 3/28/2006, you wrote:

> Joe is right. The OA-advantage is just a visibility/ 
> discoverability advantage. However, a few major publishers have 
> seen some very strong correlations: between downloads and 
> citations, and between visibility and downloads (e.g. articles 
> in issues that are being made freely available, generally for 
> promotional purposes, usually attract appreciably more downloads 
> than comparable articles, e.g. in other, non-free issues of the 
> same journal). This may well mean that a visibility/ 
> discoverability advantage translates into a citation advantage.