Open access, impact, and demand

doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7500.1097

BMJ 2005;330:1097-1098 (14 May), doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7500.1097

Editorial

Open access, impact, and demand

Why some authors self archive their articles

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The great current divide in scientific publishing is betweenopen access articles—that is, those freely available onthe internet—and non-open access ones, those for whicha reader has to pay on order to gain access to them. BeforeJonathan Wren's study appeared (p 1128)¹ we knew that open accesscopies of scientific journal articles published in non-openaccess (subscription based) journals were a fairly small subsetof the overall journal literature.² Wren studied just whichsubset it was and found that papers from journals with highimpact factors were more likely to have free online copies atother locations around the web than papers from low impact journals.

To show why this matters, and why it's puzzling, let's reviewwhat we knew before Wren did his study. We knew that some scientistsdeposited copies of their published articles in open accessrepositories, a process called self archiving. . . . [Full text of this article]

Peter Suber, research professor

Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana 47374, USA (peters@earlham.edu)

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Rapid Responses:

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Why some authors self-archive their articles: Alma P Swan
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