PubMed Central Boosts Citations, Study Claims | The Scholarly Kitchen

"PubMed Central (PMC), a digital archive of biomedical articles, increases the citation impact of deposited papers, a recent study suggests. The paper, 'Examining the Impact of the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy on the Citation Rates of Journal Articles' was published October 8 in PLOS ONE. Its lead author, Sandra De Groote, is a Professor & Scholarly Communications Librarian at the University of Illinois, Chicago. De Groote and her colleagues were interested in measuring what effect, if any, PMC has had on the distribution of NIH-funded papers. As the NIH Public Access Policy, requiring mandatory PMC deposit, took effect in 2008, De Groote focused on two cohorts of papers: those published in 2006, when deposit was still voluntary, and 2009 after deposit became mandatory. We should note that just 9% of 2006 NIH-funded papers were deposited in PMC compared to 72% in 2009. It is not known whether these deposits were made by the author, the publisher, and in what format (author’s final manuscript vs. published XML) ..."