[Oa-italia] Articolo: The citation advantage of open access articles

[Maria Cassella]

Paola Gargiulo ha scritto:
> E’ uscito qualche giorno fa il seguente articolo
>
> - Michael Norris, Charles Oppenheim and Fytton Rowland - “The citation 
> advantage of open access articles” pubblicato sull’ultimo fascicolo 
> del ” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and 
> Technology (JASIST) 9 July 2008 - Editore Wiley. La rivista non e’ ad 
> accesso aperto, ma è accessibile solo ai sottoscrittori della rivista 
> Wiley. Non so se ci sia in giro il pre-print ad accesso aperto. Non ho 
> provato a cercarlo ;-)
>
> http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120748494/abstract
>
>
Ho cercato molto velocemente in Google ma ho trovato solo questo 
contributo degli stessi autori nei Proceedings di ELPUB 2008
"Open access citation rates and developing countries"
 http://elpub.scix.net/cgi-bin/works/Show?_id=335_elpub2008 .

Abstract in inglese:

Academics, having written their peer reviewed articles, may at some 
stage in the make their work Open Access (OA). They can do this by 
self-archiving an electronic version of their article to a personal or 
departmental web page or to an institutional or subject repository, such 
that the article then becomes freely available to anyone with Internet 
access to read and cite. Those authors who do not wish to do this may 
leave their article solely in the hands of a toll access (TA) journal 
publisher who charges for access, consigning their article to remain 
behind a subscription barrier. Lawrence (2003), in a short study, noted 
that conference articles in computer science that were freely available 
on the World Wide Web were more highly cited that those that were not. 
Following this, there have been a number of studies which have tried to 
establish whether peer-reviewed articles from a range of disciplines 
which are freely available on the World Wide Web, and hence are OA, 
accrue more citations than those articles which remain behind 
subscription barriers (Antelman 2004, Davis and Fromerth 2007, Eysenbach 
2006, Harnad and Brody 2004, Kurtz and Henneken 2007, Moed 2007). These 
authors generally agree that there is a citation advantage to those 
articles that have been made OA, but are either uncertain about, or find 
that they cannot agree on, the cause of this advantage. The causes of 
this citation advantage could simply be that OA articles are available 
well in advance of formal publication, and so have a longer period in 
which to accrue citations, or simply that more authors, because they are 
freely available, can read and cite them. As part of this debate, Smith 
(2007) asked whether authors from developing countries might contribute 
to higher citation counts by accessing OA articles and citing them more 
readily than TA articles. As part of a larger study of the citation 
advantage of OA articles (Norris, Oppenheim and Rowland 2008), research 
was undertaken to see whether a higher proportion of citations to OA 
articles came from authors based in countries where funds for the 
purchase of journals are very limited. Mathematics was chosen as the 
field to be studied, because no special programme for access in 
developing countries, such as HINARI (2007), covers this subject. The 
results show that the majority of citations were given by Americans to 
Americans, but the admittedly small number of citations from authors in 
developing countries do seem to show a higher proportion of citations 
given to OA articles than is the case for citations from developed 
countries. Some of the evidence for this conclusion is, however, mixed, 
with some of the data pointing toward a more complex picture of citation 
behaviour"

saluti a tutti
MC

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