Open Access Availability Of Anatomy Papers Presented At Meetings Of The American And British Associations Of Clinical Anatomists - Miller - - Clinical Anatomy - Wiley Online Library

"When work does not reach OA publication, readership from the wider medical community may be restricted, limiting the scope for critical appraisal to either conference attendees (von Elm et al., 2003) or those able to mitigate the financial cost of paper access (Velterop, 2003). The gold standard for anatomical research accessibility maytherefore be OA peer-reviewed publication following presentation at a national meeting....

The primary objective of this study was to quantify the proportion of anatomy research papers that are available as gold and bronze OA. The secondary objective comprised quantitative analysis of citation rates between gold and bronze OA and non-OA papers....

The combined proportion of open access publications was 20.0% (125 of 625). The open access publication rate from research presented was 18.75% (69 of 368) at BACA and 21.79% (56 of 257) at AACA [American Association of Clinical Anatomists]. The total number of publications published by year and the average OA publication rate per year can be seen in Figure 2 for AACA and Figure 3 for BACA [British Association of Clinical Anatomists]....

This study is the first to assess the longitudinal citation rates of OA and non-OA Anatomy publications and one of the largest individual studies comparing OA and non-OA citation rates in medical research. These data have shown that citation rates are significantly higher (n on-OA 15.14 vs OA 18.95 p=0.047) amongst OA anatomy papers presented at these two conferences. On average, conference papers were cited 16.4 times (BACA 16.56, AACA 16.19) ranging from 0-236. In view of this, it is encouraging that BACA OA publication rates have improved in recent years...."