Evidence-based practice and open access

Open access to scholarly works can be defined as “making your work freely available — free to read and also free to be re-used by others,” says Allison Langham-Putrow, Scholarly Communications and Engineering Librarian. Yet she estimates that less than half of scholarly materials are available as open access. One of the reasons people advocate for open access publishing is the idea that the article will receive more citations — and thus the author will be able to show a greater scholarly impact. Langham-Putrow, Caitlin Bakker, Research Services Liaison, and Amy Riegelman, Social Sciences Librarian, decided to investigate whether the evidence supported this idea.