Whenever I need cheering up, I scan through the Open Access News blog. There is so much going on there, and it’s so good.

For instance: here’s a study that’s using collected data on paper citations to test how much more likely a paper is to get cited if it is placed in an open access (i.e. free to read) archive instead of just being published in a traditional (i.e. ridiculously expensive to read and/or hard to get access to, even though your taxes probably already funded the work) journal. It only covers physics and math papers, and I can see maybe some minor conceptual flaws with the study, but holy cow is it ever a benefit to an author to go open access if they want to get cited more. Which they do of course.

For instance, in the “General Biology” subgrouping (yeah, I don’t get it either, wasn’t it just for math and physics?), you are 457 frickin (yes, frickin) % as likely to get published if you go OA. In “literature, language and linguistic”, the advantage is 1236%, with a sample of 80 OA papers. Holy.

There are lots of less tangible (and I think more significant) benefits to increasing open access publishing of academic papers, but this is the kind of benefit that is particularly likely to have immeadiate appeal to researchers deciding where to publish. So woohoo.

According to this related bibliography 20% of all papers are OA. Can that possibly be true? It seems really high. According to the above study, in most fields it looks like less than 1%, which sounds much more accurate.

What I really don’t understand from the study is this: one of the good things about it is that they use papers which were originally published in non-OA journals and then were transferred to OA “archives” to compare against non-OA only papers, which means their control (non-OA) group is well related to their test group. In other words, they’ve controlled their variables well. What I don’t get is, how can you move your paper to OA after you’ve submitted it to a non-OA journal? I thought the journal got publication rights out of the deal? Well, if you can do that, that’s good news too.

Especially to me. I’m gettin my ass published soon, and as much as I’d love it to be, it’s not in an OA journal. They are rare things, those OA journals. If there is, as this paper suggests, such a thing as a post hoc OA archive you can move your papers to, and if my coauthors are one day amenable to it, maybe I too will boost my citations to massive levels by making the move to the Light Side.

Maybe someday I will even publish straight to PLoS Remote Sensing of Theoretical Conservation Ecology. A boy can dream can’t he?