Article,
The impact of OAI-based search on access to research journal papers
Serials: The Journal for the Serials Community, 16 (3): 255--260 (November 2003)
Abstract
Intuitively, if a product is useful and has both a priced and a free version its total usage rate would be expected to be higher than if there is only a priced version. Evidence is emerging that this is true for online research journal papers. Authors need accessible online sites in which to deposit their published papers, and users need a means of discovering and evaluating those papers. The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) has now produced free software packages for building OAI-compliant institutional archives and OAI search services, including a citation-ranked search and impact discovery service. New data from this service shows that higher usage of free papers leads directly to a higher number of citations and thus greater research impact. Institutional archives need far more papers to be deposited, and one way of bringing this about is to implement institutional and national policies mandating the self-archiving of all funded research output in open access archives. This paper outlines why such policies are beneficial to researchers, their institutions, funders, and to research itself.
