Maximize the Reach and Impact of Your Work
Traditional publishing imposes price and permission barriers on some portion of the audience that could read and be affected by your scholarship. Maximizing access to your work will maximize its impact.
Remove Restrictions on Access to your Work
If you retain important copyrights in your work and use one of the alternative forms of publishing that do not have restrictions on access, you enlarge your audience, increase the sharing of knowledge, and accelerate research.
Increase Others’ Use of Your Work
If you retain important copyrights in your work, you can grant non-exclusive rights to others to use your work in their research and teaching. If you have published your work in an alternative form, for example, in an open access journal or by depositing a copy in the eScholarship Repository, your audience will get immediate, cost-free access to your work.
There is growing evidence that unrestricted access increases research citations, an important measure of impact. When analyzing 120,000 computer science articles, Steve Lawrence, a scientist at NEC Research Institute, found that articles with higher levels of citations were open access. The strength of this correlation steadily increased over a decade.
Source: Steve Lawrence, "Online or Invisible?" Nature, Vol. 411, No. 6837, 2001. pp. 521.
More Information
- Framing the issue — open access: From the Association of Research Libraries.
- Resources for reference: Includes links to resources from the UC campuses and other organizations addressing issues in scholarly communication.