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Re: Usage of Open Access articles

At 00:21 23/06/2005, Joseph Esposito wrote:

There are many reasons to support OA, but increased use of scholarly
materials is not among them.
Open access will *always* increase usage. That is the whole point. It
benefits authors (more readings, more citations) and it benefits everyone
who wishes to use an OA paper. Everything else flows from this.

How can I be sure that any OA paper will get more usage, certainly no less
usage, than if it were not OA, even against the publishers'
Google-dependent marketing juggernaut that Joe sees in prospect (quite how
long it's taken people to realise this is another matter)? Because any OA
version of a paper is in ADDITION to the peer-reviewed published version. So the authors with some foresight get the benefits of OA and the
publisher's marketing efforts.

It's a simple point - open access AND publish not OR publish - that is
often overlooked, but OA is so much more understandable once you get it.

Steve Hitchcock
IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 3256 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865