Open Access: The Sooner the Better
Michael Eisen and Steven Salzberg (and others) have written a letter to the editor in response to a Science magazine Brevia titled “Open access and global participation in science” (20 February, p. 1025) [see previous blog post]. They write:
J. A. Evans and J. Reimer argue that a research article published online is only modestly (8%) more likely to be cited if it is freely available. This result would seem to cast doubt on one important argument in favor of free access—that it will increase the visibility of a paper to colleagues. However, the 8% statistic that Evans and Reimer highlight is misleading. The authors’ supporting online material (figure S1C) clearly shows that the impact of free access on citations is heavily dependent on the age of the article at the time free access was provided. In particular, when articles were made freely available within 2 years of publication, their citations increased by almost 20%.
Read on: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/325/5938/266-c
In another letter in response to the Evans and Reimer article, Philip Davis points out that the authors “ignore other sources of open-access articles, such as when authors pay to make their articles freely available in subscription-access journals (2) or use self-archiving.” Read Davis’ letter at: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sci;325/5938/266-a
And, one last letter worth reading: Open Access: The Self-Selection Effect
