My thanks to those who pointed to Steve Lawrence's work, based on
conference articles in computer science and related disciplines:
http://www.neci.nec.com/~lawrence/papers/online-nature01/
Online or Invisible?, Steve Lawrence, NEC Research Institute
An edited version appears in: Nature, Volume 411, Number 6837, p. 521,
2001:
http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/lawrence.html
Free online availability substantially increases a paper's impact.
An excerpt:
"The results are dramatic, showing a clear correlation between the
number of times an article is cited and the probability that the
article is online. More highly cited articles, and more recent
articles, are significantly more likely to be online, in computer
science. The mean number of citations to offline articles is 2.74,
and the mean number of citations to online articles is 7.03, an
increase of 157%."
If these dramatic results (for conference articles in computer science and
related disciplines) could be confirmed in other unrelated disciplines,
then the evidence would become even more compelling.
Another question: has anyone obtained evidence that the impact factors for
open-access journals have increased across time, in comparison with
competing toll-access journals?
Jim Till
University of Toronto
Received on Sat Nov 30 2002 - 13:15:39 GMT