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https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/15/open-access-makes-research-more-widely-cited-helping-spread-knowledge/>
"Open access has been discussed many times here on
Techdirt. There are
several strands to its story. It’s about allowing the public to access research
they have paid for through tax-funded grants, without needing to take out often
expensive subscriptions to academic titles. It’s about saving educational
institutions money that they are currently spending on over-priced academic
journals, and which could be better spent elsewhere. It’s about helping to
spread knowledge without the friction that traditional publishing introduces,
ideally moving to licenses that allow academic research papers to be
distributed freely and without restrictions.
But there’s another aspect that receives less attention, revealed here by a new
paper that looks at how open access articles are used in a particular and
important context – that of Wikipedia. There is a natural synergy between the
two, which both aim to make access to knowledge easier. The paper seeks to
quantify that:
we analyze a large dataset of citations from Wikipedia and model the role of
open access in Wikipedia’s citation patterns. We find that open-access
articles are extensively and increasingly more cited in Wikipedia. What is
more, they show a 15% higher likelihood of being cited in Wikipedia when
compared to closed-access articles, after controlling for confounding
factors. This open-access citation effect is particularly strong for
articles with low citation counts, including recently published ones. Our
results show that open access plays a key role in the dissemination of
scientific knowledge, including by providing Wikipedia editors timely access
to novel results. These findings have important implications for
researchers, policymakers, and practitioners in the field of information
science and technology.
What this means in practice is that for the general public open access articles
are even more beneficial than those published in traditional titles, since they
frequently turn up as Wikipedia sources that can be consulted directly. They
are also advantageous for the researchers who write them, since their work is
more likely to be cited on the widely-read and influential Wikipedia than if
the papers were not open access. As the research notes, this effect is even
more pronounced for “articles with low citation counts” – basically, academic
work that may be important but is rather obscure. This new paper provides yet
another compelling reason why researchers should be publishing their work as
open access as a matter of course: out of pure self interest."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
