The Open Access Citation Advantage

I just read an especially clear and concise discussion of the Open Access citation advantage. This is from Colin Smith's blog, Open Research Online:

"For those unfamiliar with this, based on the (quite reasonable) assumptions that:

1) a proportion of researchers do not have access to all published research that is relevant to them;
2) the problem would be otherwise addressed by unavailable research being freely available online; and
3) some of these articles would be relevant, and thus citable…

the expectation is that published research made openly accessible online will carry a “citation advantage”. In other words, by publishing or archiving research in an open access manner, the chances of one’s work being cited improves."

If you want to look at this in more detail, Alma Swan reviews the published research on the OA citation advantage here (and the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the existence of the citation advantage, contra some skeptics) :

Swan, Alma
2010 The Open Access Citation Advantage: Studies and Results to Date (draft version). Technical Report. School of Electronics & Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton.

A very important point to bring away from this is that the citation advantage does not require waiting until all journals are published as open access ("gold OA"). Rather, it happens when authors self-archive their peer-reviewed publications, either in an institutional repository or in another fashion ("green OA").

If you do not already self-archive your publications, you should do one of these (and if you don't publish your work, I'm not sure why you are reading this blog):

• If your university or institution has an institutional repository, sign up and start using it. I can't do this, since ASU does not have such a repository.
  
• Sign up with Academia.edu and post your papers there. Yes, I know, the interface for posting paper is clunky and inefficient, but it works. And Academia.edu has EXCELLENT coverage in Google searches. I do this, but with only a few papers.
  
• Sign up with Selected Works by Berkeley Electronic Press and post your papers there. I do this too, partly as an experiment; but the interface and download statistics are great.
  
• Get space on your institution's server, make your own webpage, and post your papers. This is where I post everything (well, almost everything).
  
• Get space on a commercial server (even Facebook will work, I think) and post your papers.
  

It does not take much time, and it will improve your citation levels and make colleagues (like me) happy.