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Benefits of Open Access

• Increase visibility of research outputs
• Increases reach of research to other researchers around the world
• Increase citation rates
• Increase the impact and readership of research
• Provide free online access to the public, previously unavailable
• Creates transparency

Open Access "..gives readers extraordinary power to find and make use of relevant literature, and that gives authors and their works vast and measurable new visibility, readership, and impact " Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002).

Why make your work Open Access

There are many benefits to making your work Open Access.  This includes researcher benefits such as increased citations, as well as public benefits such as making work available to people who might not otherwise have access to that knowledge.  The following graphic highlights the numerous benefits of making your work Open Access.

Citation Advantage

The citation advantage of Open Access  has been well examined over last 15 years, with the majority of studies concluding that there is a significant citation advantage for OA articles. Recently a large scale analysis (over 300,000 publications) concluded that OA articles receive 18% more citations than otherwise expected taking into account age and discipline.  Green OA papers (i.e those in repositories such as VU Research Repository) were cited  even more i.e. 30% above expectations [Piwowar et all (2018)]

Reach more readers

A report commissioned by Nature found that open access articles were viewed three times more than articles that were only available to subscribers.