Case study: Open Access visibility and impact of an individual researcher
Researcher: Professor Ray Frost, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia
Ray Frost is a chemist. He publishes prolifically and about three years ago he began depositing his articles in the QUT repository (under a mandatory requirement implemented at that time). So far, Ray Frost has deposited over 300 of his articles. This sizeable baseline means that proper conclusions about the increased impact Open Access brings can be drawn.The charts below (derived from data from the Web of Science) show the patterns of publication and citations to those publications.
What the data show is this: on the left are the papers Ray Frost has published each year since 1992 (the data are from Web of Science). These have been downloaded over 165,000 times from the QUT repository at the time of writing. On the right are the citations he has gathered over that time period.
From 2000 to 2003, citations were approximately flat-lining at about 300 per year, from 35-40 papers per year. When Ray started putting his articles into the QUT repository, the numbers of citations began to take off. The latest count is 1200 in one year. Even though Ray’s publication rate went up a bit over this period – to 55-60 papers per year – the increase in citations is impressive. And unless Ray’s work suddenly became super-important in 2004, the extra impact is a direct result of Open Access.
QUT library staff routinely add DOIs to each article deposited in the repository. Would-be users who can access the published version will generally do so using those. The 165,000 downloads are from users who do not have access to Ray’s articles through their own institution’s subscriptions – the whole purpose of Open Access.
