RE: Open Access Advantage (or Not!)

[<Grace@biomedcentral.com>]

Dear Phil,

In May 2005, PNAS announced

"PNAS Open Access articles receive 50% more full-text accesses 
and PDF downloads than subscription-access articles in the first 
month after publication and maintain higher usage in subsequent 
months."

See 
http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/ListArchives/0505/msg01580.html

Perhaps PNAS would be one suitable starting point for your research?

Kind regards

Grace

Grace Baynes
BioMed Central


-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu]On Behalf Of Phil Davis
Sent: 31 March 2006 02:47
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Open Access Advantage (or Not!)

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.