Please use this form to submit your study for inclusion into our database. It will be checked by a member of the Innovation Growth Lab team, who may be in contact to ask for more information. Your email address * Your name * Title * The name of the study Short summary A brief description of the project's goals and its current state Abstract <p>Does free access to journal articles result in greater diffusion of scientific knowledge? Using a randomized controlled trial of open access publishing, involving 36 participating journals in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, we report on the effects of free access on article downloads and citations. Articles placed in the open access condition (n=712) received significantly more downloads and reached a broader audience within the first year, yet were cited no more frequently, nor earlier, than subscription-access control articles (n=2533) within 3 yr. These results may be explained by social stratification, a process that concentrates scientific authors at a small number of elite research universities with excellent access to the scientific literature. The real beneficiaries of open access publishing may not be the research community but communities of practice that consume, but rarely contribute to, the corpus of literature.</p> The full abstract of the study, if available Links https://doi.org/10.1096/fj.11-183988 Links to any published papers and related discussions Authors * Affiliations Academic and other institutes that the authors of the study are members of Delivery partner Organisations involved in delivering the trial, if appropriate Year Year Year199419951996199719981999200020012002200320042005200620072008200920102011201220132014201520162017201820192020202120222023202420252026 Month MonthJanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec Day Day12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031 Journal Journal publishing the study, if available Publication stage * Working Paper Published Ongoing Research Forthcoming Discussion Paper Research theme * Entrepreneurship Innovation Business Growth Country Country or countries where this study took place. Topics What sort of topics does the study cover? Sample attributes Hypotheses / research question How does free and immediate access to the scientific literature affect readership? How does free and immediate access to the scientific literature affect citation behavior? Sample Trial population and sample selection Number of treatment groups Size of treatment groups Size of control group Unit of analysis Clustered? Yes No Cluster details Trial attributes Treatment description Academic articles from a sample of journals were randomly given open access tag, so anyone could access and read them without paying a fee or having a license. Rounds of data collection Baseline data collection and method Data collection method and data collected Evaluation Outcome variables <p>Impact on downloads, citations, unique visitors</p> Results <p>Articles placed in open access received significantly more downloads and reached a broader audience within the first year, yet were cited no more frequently, nor earlier, than subscription-access control articles within 3 yrs. </p> Intervention costs Cost benefit ratio Reference Davis, P. M. (2011). 'Open access, readership, citations: a randomized controlled trial of scientific journal publishing.'. The FASEB Journal. Citation for use in academic references
