Subject Guide
Cardinal Scholar at a Glance
Facts and Findings
- Researchers and scholars can currently access over 25,000,000 items held in more than 2,500 open access repositories worldwide.
- A study conducted by Kristin Antelman shows a significant increase in citations for open access publications in the fields of philosophy, political science, electrical and electronic engineering, and mathematics.
- Research suggests that visibility and accessibility gained through open access publishing is greatest for highly cited, high-quality research and scholarship.
- Institutional repositories can provide metrics documenting the global impact of an item deposited, including number of page views and geographic range of visitors, to any contributor.
- A study conducted by Carol Watson and James M. Donovan showed that open access legal research was cited by scholars between 5.5 and 15 times more than non-open access research.
- Research shows that, in the field of physics contributing to open access can increase citations of a scholarly work by 233% to 557%.
- A 2005 study of a biomedical journal found that making the journal open access increased its citations by a factor ranging from 3 to 4.5.
- Recent research emphasizes the importance of open access self-archiving of scholarly preprints on accelerating scholarly communication.
- A 2009 study focusing on published agricultural research found a six-fold increase in citations for open access articles when compared to non-open access articles.
- Over 25 individual studies of scholarly communication have confirmed a citation advantage for open access scholarship.