Open Access: Increased Citations Not Guaranteed

摘要

In their brevia "open access and global participation in science" (20 February, p. 1025), J. A. Evans and J. Reimer report a small but significant citation effect (about 8%) that they attribute to free access to the scientific literature. However, Evans and Reimer only measure the effect of open access where publishing is concerned, such as when a journal makes articles freely available after a period of delay (7). They ignore other sources of open-access articles, such as when authors pay to make their articles freely available in subscription-access journals (2) or use self-archiving. In a randomized controlled trial of open-access publishing, we were unable to detect a citation advantage that could be attributed to access status, although we did observe that open-access articles received more article downloads from more visitors (3).