Open Access: The Self-Selection Effect

摘要

In the brevia "open access and global participation in science" (20 February, p. 1025), J. A. Evans and J. Reimer claim that open access-i.e., free and unrestricted online access to scientific publications-has little influence on research attention, as measured by article citation frequency. Their claim is questionable, however, because it assumes that open access is a randomly assigned journal attribute, whereas it is actually assigned by publishers according to their objectives and the characteristics of the journal.