1. Increasing Research Impact Through Open Access Publishing
Jack Young • Health Sciences Library •

2. What is Impact? How your research is utilized… Societal Impact
Economic Impact
Technological Impact
Academic Impact

3. How Is Impact Measured? Impact is measured through indicators…
Peer/Expert Review
E.g. Awards Received
Output-Based
E.g. Number of Publications; Funding Awarded
Use-Based
E.g. Citations; Mentions; Downloads

4. How is Impact Tracked? Citations Media Coverage Downloads/Views
Citation indexing databases (e.g. Web of Science)
Media Coverage
Altmetric aggregators (e.g. AltMetric)
Downloads/Views
Databases, journal websites, etc.
You don’t want your impact to be negatively affected by your decision to publish openly

5. Open Access Impact Advantage
Page Views
Wang, X., Liu, C., Mao, W., & Fang Z. (2015). The open access advantage considering citation, article usage and social media attention. Scientometrics, 103(2),
1761 Nature Communications articles ( )
587 OA vs Subscription
There are, in fact, people who don’t have subscriptions who are interested in the research being published.

6. Open Access Impact Advantage
Downloads
“Open Access articles garnered 89% more full text downloads than their subscription-based counterparts in the first 6 months of publication."
Davis, P. M., Lewenstein, B. V., Simon, D. H., Booth, J. G., & Connolly, M. J. (2008). Open access publishing, article downloads, and citations: randomised controlled trial. BMj, 337, a568.
11 Journals
1619 articles

7. Open Access Impact Advantage
Twitter Mentions
Adie, E. (23 October, 2014). Attention! A study of open access vs. non-open access articles. Altmetric Blog. Retrieved from:
Nature Communications
Driving more and more eyes to your research – giving you more and more opportunities to be cited.
Conducting great research isn’t’ always enough to ensure it get’s read.

8. Open Access Impact Advantage
Citations
Studies assessing the citation advantage of open access publications:
Total Studies
Citation Advantage
No Citation Advantage
Inconclusive 70 46 17 7
SPARC Europe. (2015). The Open Access Citation Advantage Service. Retrieved from:

9. Open Access Impact Advantage
Citations
McKiernan, E.C., Bourne, P.E., Brown, C.T., Buck, S., Kenall, A., Lin, J…Yarkoni, T. (2016). Point of view: How open science helps researchers succeed. Elife, July 7, 2016.

10. Open Access Impact Advantage
Limitations
Self Selection Bias
Authors may choose to make their best, or most broadly relevant, articles open access.
Context Dependent
Citation rates and citation advantages vary greatly across disciplines.
Comparison/Control Groups
Defining a valid comparison/control group can be difficult. Different publications have different reach.

11. Increasing Your Impact
What can you do?
1) Identify High Quality Journals
Directory of Open Access Journals
Ulrich’s Web (Peer Review & Indexing)
Journal Citation Reports (Impact Factor)
2) Explore Open Options
“For Authors” Sections of Journal Websites
SHERPA/RoMEO (Database of Archiving Policies)
3) Archive Your Work
MacSphere (McMaster Institutional Repository)
Subject Repositories (e.g. arXiv)
4) Promote Your Work
ResearchGate
Academia.edu
Twitter
There are a lot of ways to make your work open.

12. Further Reading
Kiernan, V. (2003). Diffusion of news about research. Science Communication, 25(1), Retrieved from:
OpCit Project. (2013). The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies. Retrieved from:
Ottaviani, J. (2016). The Post-Embargo Open Access Citation Advantage: It Exists (Probably), It’s Modest (Usually), and the Rich Get Richer (of Course). PLOS ONE, 11(8), e Retrieved from
McMaster University Library. (2018). Open Access [website]. Retrieved from:

13. Increasing Research Impact Through Open Access Publishing
Jack Young • Health Sciences Library •