How institutions can encourage Open Access

Repositories can provide usage data to show the number of times articles have been downloaded. The levels of this type of usage can be surprising. For example, the University of Otago’s Business School set up an Open Access repository in November 2005: by February 2006, with just 220 articles in it at the time, it had received almost 20,000 ‘hits’ (downloads) (Stanger and McGregor, 2006). No doubt many of these are translating into citations over time. Several studies have been done on the increased citation impact that Open Access can bring (original studies: Kurtz, 2004; Brody & Harnad, 2004; Antelman, 2005; Hajjem, Harnad and Gingras, 2006: bibliography of studies on the Open Access citation advantage).

There are two reports bringing together all the published studies on the Open Access citation advantage (Swan, 2010: Wagner, 2010)

Stevan Harnad’s groups in Southampton and Montreal continue to work on this and their early results are shown in Figure 4, which depicts the increase in citations of Open Access articles over those for Closed Access articles in the same issue of the same journal (Brody & Harnad, 2004, Brody, Harnad and Carr, 2005). This study is ongoing and new disciplines will be added to the list, but the striking finding is that across all disciplines there is an Open Access advantage for citations.

Implementing a policy on Open Access

This is critical in spreading the word about Open Access and in securing author involvement. Policies from funders and employers are increasing rapidly now. An institution developing an Open Access policy must take a number of things into account:

Formulating an institutional Open Access policy

Author concerns about Open Access

Open Access policies for universities and research institutions