A Global Perspective On The Open Access Effect

I am quite interested in the debate regarding Open Access (OA) to scientific publications. Accordingly,  this week my attention was drawn to a one-page article in Science by University of Chicago researchers James Evans and Jacob Reimer titled Open Access and Global Participation in Science.

The question of how OA influences science is a popular one. In the last decade, many studies have addressed the question: are OA papers more widely disseminated, read and cited? Evans and Reimer take a new perspective and ask how the influence varies by per capita gross national income (GNI).

The results of this study show that in the developing world, the OA Effect is significantly greater than it is in first world countries. Evans and Reimer report their results in terms of percent increase in citations and say that OA leads to ~8% increase in countries with the highest GNI. As shown in the graph below, “The influence of OA was more than twice as strong in the developing world”*.

Percentage increase in citations after free online access versus GNI*

Just as journals are often judged on their Impact Factor, scientists are often judged on their H-index. Increased citation rates should motivate publishers to provide an OA option and motivate scientists to pay for such an option when available. Both groups would do well to take note of the global perspective  presented in Open Access and Global Participation in Science.

*Open Access and Global Participation in Science. Evans, James A and Reimer, Jacob. 2009, Science, Vol. 323, p. 1025.

Guests Are Coming!

As I said in an earlier post, the primary objective of this blog is to provide an open forum for information sharing and communication within the scientific community. To ensure that we capture the widest range of perspectives and keep the information flow fresh and current, we have decided to host guest bloggers.

Our guest bloggers will post on a wide range of interesting topics relevant to life scientists and of course provide their own unique perspectives on this diverse domain. If you would like to be a guest blogger we’d love to hear from you.

Stay tuned – our first guest blogger will be posting soon!

Finding Common Ground – An Evening With Creative Commons

Last night Creative Commons held a salon in San Francisco with short talks given by several members of the Creative Commons team including John Wilbanks from Science Commons.

John is an excellent speaker whose enthusiasm reveals his passion for improving science. He gave a thought-provoking talk about creating a network effect in science similar to the effect that drove the evolution of ARPANET into the Internet we know today.

One of the points John brought up was how the hardcopy journal article has become an online PDF, bringing with it almost all of the limitations of hardcopy text. “We digitized science but we didn’t make it digital” John said, in reference to this incremental change in scientific communication. Networking scientific data would allow scientists to see connections, generate innovative hypothesis, and better utilize the massive amount of data in the public domain.

Following the talks there was a reception giving people time to discuss the ideas that had been raised. I noticed from across that room that my colleague, NextBio co-founder Ilya Kupershmidt, was engaged in a lively conversation with John. I made my way over to do a little eavesdropping. It was very fascinating to watch the high-bandwidth exchange between two very bright people as they found common ground in their shared objectives.

Ilya Kupershmidt and John Wilbanks at the Creative Commons Salon

Ilya Kupershimdt and John Wilbanks by Lisa Green is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Ilya was energized after talking with John and told me that he was excited by the progress Science Commons has made in changing people’s perceptions about the value of information sharing. “Their work is highly related to NextBio’s work – we have the common goal of making the world’s life science information universally accessible. “