Philip M. Davis

Open access publishing, article downloads, and citations: randomised controlled trial

Objective To measure the effect of free access to the scientific literature on article downloads and citations. Design Randomised controlled trial. Setting 11 journals published by the American Physiological Society. Participants 1619 research articles and reviews. Main outcome measures Article readership (measured as downloads of full text, PDFs, and abstracts) and number of unique visitors (internet protocol addresses). Citations to articles were gathered from the Institute for Scientific Information after one year. Interventions Random assignment on online publication of articles published in 11 scientific journals to open access (treatment) or subscription access (control). Results 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. Open access articles were no more likely to be cited than subscription access articles in the first year after publication. Fifty nine per cent of open access articles (146 of 247) were cited nine to 12 months after publication compared with 63% (859 of 1372) of subscription access articles. Logistic and negative binomial regression analysis of article citation counts confirmed no citation advantage for open access articles. Conclusions Open access publishing may reach more readers than subscription access publishing. No evidence was found of a citation advantage for open access articles in the first year after publication. The citation advantage from open access reported widely in the literature may be an artefact of other causes.

Open access, readership, citations: a randomized controlled trial of scientific journal publishing

Does free access to journal articles result in greater diffusion of scientific knowledge? Using a randomized controlled trial of open access publishing, involving 36 participating journals in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, we report on the effects of free access on article downloads and citations. Articles placed in the open access condition (n=712) received significantly more downloads and reached a broader audience within the first year, yet were cited no more frequently, nor earlier, than subscription‐access control articles (n=2533) within 3 yr. These results may be explained by social stratification, a process that concentrates scientific authors at a small number of elite research universities with excellent access to the scientific literature. The real beneficiaries of open access publishing may not be the research community but communities of practice that consume, but rarely contribute to, the corpus of literature.—Davis, P. M. Open access, readership, citations: a randomized controlled trial of scientific journal publishing. FASEB J. 25, 2129‐2134 (2011). www.fasebj.org

Effect of the Web on Undergraduate Citation Behavior: Guiding Student Scholarship in a Networked Age

This article provides the last update to a longitudinal study tracking the research behavior of a multi-college undergraduate course in microeconomics from 1996 to 2001. Student term paper bibliographies grew between 1996 and 2000 but included fewer scholarly resources. In 2001, students tended to cite scholarly sources when the professor provided clear and enforceable guidelines in his class assignment. The accuracy and persistency of cited Web documents also increased as a result.

The effect of the web on undergraduate citation behavior 1996-1999

A citation analysis of undergraduate term papers in microeconomics revealed a significant decrease in the frequency of scholarly resources cited between 1996 and 1999. Book citations decreased from 30% to 19%, newspaper citations increased from 7% to 19%, and Web citations increased from 9% to 21%. Web citations checked in 2000 revealed that only 18% of URLs cited in 1996 led to the correct Internet document. For 1999 bibliographies, only 55% of URLs led to the correct document. The authors recommend (1) setting stricter guidelines for acceptable citations in course assignments; (2) creating and maintaining scholarly portals for authoritative Web sites with a commitment to long-term access; and (3) continuing to instruct students how to critically evaluate resources.

Does the arXiv lead to higher citations and reduced publisher downloads for mathematics articles

An analysis of 2, 765 articles published in four math journals from 1997 to 2005 indicate that articles deposited in the arXiv received 35% more citations on average than non-deposited articles (an advantage of about 1.1 citations per article), and that this difference was most pronounced for highly-cited articles. Open Access, Early View, and Quality Differential were examined as three non-exclusive postulates for explaining the citation advantage. There was little support for a universal Open Access explanation, and no empirical support for Early View. There was some inferential support for a Quality Differential brought about by more highly-citable articles being deposited in the arXiv. In spite of their citation advantage, arXiv-deposited articles received 23% fewer downloads from the publisher’s website (about 10 fewer downloads per article) in all but the most recent two years after publication. The data suggest that arXiv and the publisher’s website may be fulfilling distinct functional needs of the reader.

Information-seeking behavior of chemists: a transaction log analysis of referral URLs

This study reports an analysis of referral URL data by the Cornell University IP address from the American Chemical Society servers. The goal of this work is to better understand the tools used and pathways taken when scientists connect to electronic journals. While various methods of referral were identified in this study, most individuals were referred infrequently and followed few and consistent pathways each time they connected. The relationship between the number and types of referrals followed an inverse-square law. Whereas the majority of referrals came from established finding tools (library catalog, library e-journal list, and bibliographic databases), a substantial number of referrals originated from generic Web searches. Scientists are also relying on local alternatives or substitutes such as departmental or personal Web pages with lists of linked publications. The use of electronic mail as a method to refer scientists directly to online articles may be greatly underestimated. Implications for the development of redundant library services such as e-journal lists and the practice of publishers to allow linking from other resources are discussed.

The impact of free access to the scientific literature: a review of recent research

OBJECTIVES The paper reviews recent studies that evaluate the impact of free access (open access) on the behavior of scientists as authors, readers, and citers in developed and developing nations. It also examines the extent to which the biomedical literature is used by the general public. METHOD The paper is a critical review of the literature, with systematic description of key studies. RESULTS Researchers report that their access to the scientific literature is generally good and improving. For authors, the access status of a journal is not an important consideration when deciding where to publish. There is clear evidence that free access increases the number of article downloads, although its impact on article citations is not clear. Recent studies indicate that large citation advantages are simply artifacts of the failure to adequately control for confounding variables. The effect of free access on the general publics use of the primary medical literature has not been thoroughly evaluated. CONCLUSIONS Recent studies provide little evidence to support the idea that there is a crisis in access to the scholarly literature. Further research is needed to investigate whether free access is making a difference in non-research contexts and to better understand the dissemination of scientific literature through peer-to-peer networks and other informal mechanisms.

An IP-level analysis of usage statistics for electronic journals in chemistry: Making inferences about user-behavior.

This study reports an analysis of American Chemical Society electronic journal downloads at Cornell University by individual IP addresses. While the majority of users (IPs) limited themselves to a small number of both journals and article downloads, a small minority of heavy users had a large effect on total journal downloads. There was a very strong relationship between the number of article downloads and the number of users, implying that a user-population can be estimated by just knowing the total use of a journal. Aggregate users (i.e. Library Proxy Server and public library computers) can be regarded as a sample of the entire user population. Analysis of article downloads by format (PDF versus HTML) suggests that individuals are using the system like a networked photocopier, for the purposes of creating print-on-demand copies of articles.

eJournal interface can influence usage statistics: implications for libraries, publishers, and Project COUNTER.

The design of a publishers electronic interface can have a measurable effect on electronic journal usage statistics. A study of journal usage from six COUNTER‐compliant publishers at 32 research institutions in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Sweden indicates that the ratio of PDF to HTML views is not consistent across publisher interfaces, even after controlling for differences in publisher content. The number of full‐text downloads may be artificially inflated when publishers require users to view HTML versions before accessing PDF versions or when linking mechanisms, such as CrossRef, direct users to the full text rather than the abstract of each article. These results suggest that usage reports from COUNTER‐compliant publishers are not directly comparable in their current form. One solution may be to modify publisher numbers with “adjustment factors” deemed to be representative of the benefit or disadvantage due to its interface. Standardization of some interface and linking protocols may obviate these differences and allow for more accurate cross‐publisher comparisons.

Eigenfactor : Does the Principle of Repeated Improvement Result in Better Journal Impact Estimates than Raw Citation Counts?

Eigenfactor.org, a journal evaluation tool which uses an iterative algorithm to weight citations (similar to the PageRank algorithm used for Google) has been proposed as a more valid method for calculating the impact of journals. The purpose of this brief communication is to investigate whether the principle of repeated improvement provides different rankings of journals than does a simple unweighted citation count (the method used by ISI).