Open Access yields five-fold citation advantage

Scientists in the field of high-energy physics have been using a disciplinary repository for their papers--both before and after publication in journals--for over a decade. A recent analysis of the citation data in that field has just appeared:

Gentil-Beccot, Anne, Salvatore Mele, and Travis C. brooks
2009 Citing and Reading Behaviours in High-Energy Physics: How a Community Stopped Worrying about Journals and Learned to Love Repositories. Paper posted online.

As summarized and discussed by Seven Harnad:

"This is an important study, and most of its conclusions are valid:

(1) Making research papers open access (OA) dramatically increases their impact.

(2) The earlier that papers are made OA, the greater their impact.

(3) High Energy Physics (HEP) researchers were among the first to make their papers OA (since 1991, and they did it without needing to be mandated to do it!)

(4) Gold OA provides no further impact advantage over and above Green OA."

The graphs in the paper showing that papers in the "arXiv" repository are cited five times more frequently than journal papers NOT in the repository are quite dramatic.

Are there any implications for archaeology? Hmmmmmmm.