Open Access legal articles can expect 58% more citations

In Citation Advantage of Open Access Legal Scholarship, Donovan and Watson demonstrate advantages  of Open Access legal journals:

To date, there have been no studies focusing exclusively on the impact of openaccess on legal scholarship. We examine open access articles from three journalsat the University of Georgia School of Law and confirm that legal scholarshipfreely available via open access improves an article’s research impact. Openaccess legal scholarship – which today appears to account for almost half of theoutput of law faculties – can expect to receive 58% more citations than non-openaccess writings of similar age from the same venue.

The present article offers empirical justification to assert that these benefits are real,consistent, and sizeable. The open access advantage reported for other bodies of literatureextends to include legal scholarship, albeit with some identified caveats. Open access is mostlikely to impact other legal writings, but less so the citations within court opinions.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1777090

when free e-books are offered for a relatively long period of time, without requiring registration, print sales will increase

I don’t think the conclusion of this paper can be generalized across other book types (academic ones), but it’s a worthwhile read.

The present study indicates that there is a moderate correlation between free digital books being made permanently available and short-term print sales increases. However, free digital books did not always equal increased sales. This result may be surprising, both to those who claim that when a free version is available fewer people will pay to purchase copies, as well as those who claim that free access will not harm sales. The results of the present study must be viewed with caution. Although the authors believe that free digital book distribution tends to increase print sales, this is not a universal law. The results we found cannot necessarily be generalized to other books, nor be construed to suggest causation. The timing of a free e-book’s release, the promotion it received and other factors cannot be fully accounted for. Nevertheless, we believe that this data indicates that when free e-books are offered for a relatively long period of time, without requiring registration, print sales will increase.

See full article HERE. (thanks to Patrice and Indian/sarai connection).

Recent links on Open Access

• Survival — Through Open Access: Utah State University Press survives by becoming part of the university library and embracing open access.  Library Journal has more details.
• Pirate Party Gains Second Seat In EU Parliament: The new MEP ‘will focus on a platform of fairer and more sensible copyright legislation, and will spend time on education and the development of Europe’s knowledge economy’.
• A Call for Copyright Rebellion: Lawrence Lessig argues that academic research should be released under Creative Commons licences.
• Open access movements in developing countries: ‘Dr Buhle Mbambo-Thata, Executive Director from UNISA responds to questions raised at the conference about whether the benefits of open access are limited in developing countries. She stresses the importance of the open access movement for researchers in developing countries and argues that it can support greater access to local research. She talks about how institutions need to change and promote their own researchers work in-country rather than purchasing from elsewhere, and encourage researchers to publish in open access journals.’
• Nobel Prize-winning scientists urge Congress to act to ensure free online access to federally funded research results: The scientists sent the letter in support of the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA): ‘For America to obtain an optimal return on our investment in science, publicly funded research must be shared as broadly as possible.’
• Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) 2010: Call for Proposals: ‘OKCon, now in its fifth year, is the interdisciplinary conference that brings together individuals from across the open knowledge spectrum for a day of presentations and workshops.’  The conference will take place in London, UK, on 24 April 2010.
• Open Access: Petition to the German Parliament: ‘A Petition to the German Parliament (Deutscher Bundestag) for Open Access of documents in science and research has been launched.’ Please sign it if you’re an EU citizen.

Recent links on Open Access

• Med students hoist P2P Jolly Roger to get access to papers: ‘A study provides evidence that file sharing takes place with some very specialized media: the research papers published in scientific journals.’
• Another Publishing World is Possible: A rough sketch of an idea about how authors, including academics, could bypass publishing companies altogether.
• Copyright versus Universal Access to All Human Knowledge and Groups Without Cost: the state of play in the global copyfight: Video of a lecture by Cory Doctorow.  ‘The Internet promises the realization of two of humanity’s noblest dreams: universal access to all human knowledge and the capacity to form and coordinate groups at virtually no cost. As great as this sounds, it’s bad news for certain kinds of top-heavy organizations and the kinds of companies that got rich on exclusion from information. From the UN to shady back-room “plurilateral” treaty negotiations, from the blogosphere to staid standards-committees, the fight over the future rages, with diplomacy and activism at its core.’ (Thanks to Fabio Gironi.)
• Adobe pushes Flash and PDF for open government, misses irony: ‘Adobe is pushing hard to get Flash, PDF, and other technologies used to realize recent open government initiatives. The problem is that the technologies fall short of the goal of full accessibility, and cause problems for those seeking to use government-supplied data in any meaningful way.’
• Students for Free Culture’s Open University Campaign: The goal of this project is ‘to generate a report card for universities in order to help prospective students make informed decisions about the university’s copyright, patent, and technology policies.’  The project needs your help.
• Florida free textbook project gets $300,000 grant: ‘Florida’s effort to provide free textbooks and low-cost textbooks to college students has received a $300,000 boost from the federal government.’

Recent links on Open Access

• Opening up research for better returns on taxpayers’ investment: JISC’s guide to Open Access ‘is being launched to support UK researchers in opening up their work for better returns on taxpayers’ investment.  The increased impact of wider access to academic research papers could be worth approximately £170 million per year to the UK economy.’
• Wrong Advice On Open Access: History Repeating Itself: ‘With every good intention, Jason Baird Jackson — in “Getting Yourself Out of the Business in Five Easy Steps” is giving the wrong advice on Open Access, recommending a strategy that has not only been tried and has failed and been superseded already,’ writes Stevan Harnad.
• A *really* open university: The idea of iTunes U is that ‘universities can upload content for distribution on iTunes, generally for free’.
• Hybrid journal pricing (1): Impending Oxford Open price increases: ‘Article processing charges so far seem to spiral up in the same way as subscription charges did in the past.’
• Hybrid Journal pricing (II): when and by how much will we see EMBO
  prices decrease? ‘If publishers like NPG/EMBO do not keep their promise to adjust their pricing in response to increased OA uptake and published output, we in effect have an additional revenue model, not a mixed revenue model. In this case, universities who have installed an open access fund, should indeed ask themselves whether such journals should not be excluded from their gold OA funding on a matter of principle.’
• Open Access at Concordia: What it Means to You and Your Research: ‘A Quick Reference Card that covers most of the issues brought forward by Faculty members following recent presentations at the Faculty Councils on Open Access at Concordia by Mr. Gerald Beasley, the University Librarian.’

Recent links on Open Access

• The Liberation of Textbooks: ‘The Open Educational Resources movement works to make high-quality educational materials freely available to everyone and, through the creative use of copyright laws, permits those using the resources to improve the materials, as well as re-edit them to make them more suitable to individual teaching situations.’
• Student coalition for Open Access solidifies, now represents over 5 million students internationally: ‘The student Right to Research Coalition, a group of national, international, and local student associations that advocate for governments, universities, and researchers to adopt Open Access practices, has now grown to include some of the most prominent student organizations from the United States and across the world. The recent addition of 8 new organizations brings the number of students represented by the coalition to over 5 million, demonstrating the broad, passionate support Open Access enjoys from the student community.’
• Access to Publicly-Funded Research: Why Not Now?: Reasons to support the Federal Research Public Access (FRPAA) Act currently pending in the US Congress.
• Is open-access journal publishing a vanity publishing industry?: ‘From an empirical point of view, current open-access journals display a pricing structure that does not indicate a vanity press industry, as we demonstrate below in a new analysis of OA publication fee data.’
• The Collège de France broadcasts its courses for free on line: The prestigious French academic institution now has a channel on the online video sharing site Dailymotion.
• Massively collaborative mathematics: ‘The “Polymath Project” proved that many minds can work together to solve difficult mathematical problems. Timothy Gowers and Michael Nielsen reflect on the lessons learned for open-source science.’
• Open Access Week is 19-23 October.
• Library savings from full flip to open access via article processing fees: about two-thirds savings: ‘I calculate that library savings from a full flip from subscriptions to open access via article processing fees, at the PLoS One rate of $1,350 would be at least 64%.’
• Canadian universities closed-minded on open access: ‘Canadian universities may benefit from far more public funding than their U.S. counterparts, but they have been much more reluctant to adopt open access mandates.’
• Put it in the Depot: ‘The Depot is an assured gateway to make your research Open Access.  We provide two main services: (1) a deposit service for researchers worldwide without an institutional repository in which to deposit their papers, articles, and book chapters (e-prints); (2) a re-direct service which alerts depositors to more appropriate local services if they exist.’

Recent Links on Open Access

• Writing in the Internet’s Margins: Want to write your next book on line, and allow people to comment in the margins of your drafts?  Here’s a survey of software you can use for that.
• Yale sitting on digitized books, not sure how to scan others: Microsoft ‘abruptly terminated its multi-million dollar book digitization deal with the University’.
• Lessons learned from an open access defeat: Librarians tried to get an OA resolution passed at the University of Maryland, only to discover that most of the faculty were clueless about OA; the faculty opposed the resolution for all sorts of misguided reasons.
• Income Models for Supporting Open Access: a guide for publishers and libraries, offering ‘an overview of income models currently being used to support the open-access distribution of peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journals’.
• Getting Yourself Out of the Business in Five Easy Steps: What academics can do to stop supporting the hegemony of multinational for-profit corporations in scholarly publishing.
• The STM Report: An overview of scientific and scholarly journal publishing: ‘provides a comprehensive picture of the trends and currents in scholarly communication’.
• OA books in humanities and social sciences: what users want: preliminary results of ‘a study on user needs in relation to open access book publishing within the Humanities and Social Sciences’.

Recent links on Open Access

• Free Electronic Textbooks Do Not Hurt Print Sales, Report Says: And naturally the journalist reporting the story found a publisher who disputes the study’s findings.  Let’s wait to see the final report when it’s published.
• What are the current feelings on ResearchGate starting it’s own preprint (self archive) service? A discussion about whether ResearchGate, a social networking site for researchers, is doing something useful by offering a self-archiving service.
• How and why researchers disseminate their findings: ‘Our survey shows that over 60% of researchers believe that open access repositories are either “not important” or “not applicable” to the dissemination of their research. . . . 52% of physical sciences and mathematics researchers say open access repositories are “important” or “very important”; whereas only 25% of humanities researchers say the same.’
• Open Medicine provides medical knowledge to the public: An alternative to Wikipedia?
• The Open College Textbook Act of 2009: A bill has been introduced in the US Congress stipulating that ‘textbooks created through grants distributed by Federal agencies . . . shall be licensed under an open license’.
• The Journal Manifesto 2.0: An Open Access manifesto for researchers.
• Philosophers call for Open Access: One says: ‘for many years I have been crossing out portions of copyright forms that prevent me from posting papers online’.
• The Un-Scientific Method: or, how good science becomes bad press: What every journalist should know before reporting on scientific research, and how OA can help.

Recent links on Open Access

• Pricey Cost per Page Hurts Humanities and Social-Science Journals: A study suggests that it costs more to publish humanities and social science journals than journals in the hard sciences; therefore author-pays OA is not viable in the humanities and social sciences.  (One might add that humanities and social science researchers get less funding and are therefore less likely to be able to afford author fees in the first place.) Heather Morrison questions the results of the study, and discusses alternatives to the author-pays model for OA humanities and social-science journals.
• Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: ‘presents selected English-language articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet’.
• The Stallman Paradox: ‘Until society can resolve what I will call for the first time the “Stallman Paradox”, where learning and access enabling technologies, such as for example digital books, conversely disables the freedom to read and hence more than negates the actual benefits of said access, the rush to embrace all digital libraries and textbooks is a rush to a new dark ages.’
• A crime against knowledge: In South Africa, it’s ridiculously expensive to get access to scientific journals.
• Reinventing academic publishing online. Part II: A socio-technical vision: ‘Part I of this paper outlined the limitations of feudal academic knowledge exchange and predicted its decline as cross-disciplinary research expands. Part II now suggests the next evolutionary step is democratic online knowledge exchange, run by the academic many rather than the few. Using socio-technical tools it is possible to accept all, evaluate all and publish all academic documents.’
• Criticism of OA publisher Bentham: ‘Bentham Open is exploiting the good will of those who established the Open Access model by twisting it and exploiting it for profit. . . . The site has exploited the Open Access model for its own financial motives and flooded scholarly communication with a flurry of low quality and questionable research.’
• Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity: A group of universities promise to pay author fees for Gold OA publication of their researchers’ work.  Stevan Harnad argues (convincingly, I think) that this is an ‘enormous strategic mistake‘.  Gavin Baker agrees.
• The Trouble with Wikipedia as a Source for Medical Information: It’s not reliable, because a lot of it isn’t written by experts.

presents selected English-language articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.

Recent links on Open Access

• Varmus Gets His Preprint Server: ‘The most prominent open-access biomedical research publisher—that is, the Public Library of Science (PLoS)—has launched an “experimental” site for posting raw preprints of papers on hot topics.’  See also New Open Access Repository for Unrefereed Preprints: PLoS Contents.
• Wikipedia to Limit Changes to Articles on People: ‘the English-language Wikipedia will begin imposing a layer of editorial review on articles about living people’.  They should do this for all articles.
• New Tuition-Free ‘University of the People’ Tries to Democratize Higher Ed: ‘a new institution in which students will learn in virtual communities using free online materials and social-networking tools.’
• Academic Earth: ‘Full video courses from leading universities.’