I have been following the progress of the Open Access movement in academic journals as closely as my time allows. I gave a presentation to a number of professors and students at Waseda University which talked a lot about the OA movement and I could tell that others became interested when they heard about it. This movement, to provide more open access to research articles that are usually only archived in expensive online databases or not online at all. The movement is making most progress and getting most discussion amongst scientists. There is a great blog, I may have mentioned before Open Access News, and there is also a great series of articles in Nature magazine (they also have an RSS feed for the series).
One recent article in this series mentions the fact (often discussed in these articles) that open access journals are cited more often than those only accessible in subscription databases. It also adds more evidence to this from their own research. However, they also add that some of these articles are from subscription only journals but which authors have “self-archived” and put online.
One way to estimate [the access problem] is to compare citation counts for Open Access articles with pay-to-access articles. Lawrence4 found that in computer science citations were three times higher for Open Access articles than for papers only available for payment in print or online. Kurtz et al. have since reported similar estimates in astrophysics, and Odlyzko in mathematics.We are carrying out a much larger study across all disciplines, using a 10-year sample of 14 million articles from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)’s database; initial results, for the field of physics, show Open Access articles being cited 2.5 to 5 times more than articles that users’ institutions must pay to access online, with this advantage peaking within about 3 years of an article’s publication.
All these articles were published in subscription-based journals, but some were made accessible because authors had ‘self-archived’ copies on the Web-see http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/. Physicists have been self-archiving in growing numbers since 1991 in a central archive called ArXiv. Computer scientists have been self-archiving on their own websites, which are then harvested by Citeseer.
They go on to discuss the “green” and “gold” (the latter meaning fully open online access) approaches to Open Access. It is a good read. The original article on Nature is online as is a more extensive article by its authors on their findings.