Open Access increases citation? A brief overview of two reports | Open Science

"Last week I have published a post about visibility and citations in Open Access. The post was referring to the results of two separate reports related to the subject. As the question of visibility and citations in OA journals and books remains valid, being a subject of intense debate in scientific community, the issue is worth exploring. This time round I would like to mention two interesting researches, which studied the coverage and range of citations in Open Access offering, basing on comparison between OA and non-OA journals. The research conducted by Michael Norris is quite thorough, on almost 400 pages the author describes the results of his extensive analysis in: 'The citation advantage of open access articles' ...   'Open access publishing, article downloads, and citations: randomised controlled trial' is a study designed to measure the effect of free access to the scientific literature, basing on the amount of total article downloads and citations. The researchers examined 1619 articles and reviews from 11 journals published by the American Physiological Society.  The results are remarkable and show a definite link between publishing open access and the number of following article downloads and of unique visitors in the six months after publication ..."