Group items tagged

The paper reviews recent studies that evaluate the impact of open access on the behavior of scientists as authors, readers, and citers in developed and developing nations. The paper is a critical review of the literature, with systematic description of key studies. Researchers report that their access to the scientific literature is generally good and improving. There is clear evidence that free access increases the number of article downloads, although its impact on article citations is not clear. Recent studies provide little evidence to support the idea that there is a crisis in access to the scholarly literature. Further research is needed to investigate whether free access is making a difference in non-research contexts and to better understand the dissemination of scientific literature through peer-to-peer networks and other informal mechanisms.

The aim of the Directory of Open Access Journals is to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals thereby promoting their increased usage and impact. The Directory aims to be comprehensive and cover all open access scientific and scholarly journals that use a quality control system to guarantee the content. In short a one stop shop for users to Open Access Journals. We define open access journals as journals that use a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access. From the BOAI definition of "open access" we take the right of users to "read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles" as mandatory for a journal to be included in the directory.