Scholarly publication in (slow) transition to open access

“Data from citation indexes can be analyzed to determine the popularity and impact of specific articles, authors, and publications, and the introduction of the Journal Citation Reports (JCR from Thomson Reuters) had given bibliometrics a great methodological push. Science indicators research has also been instrumental in the development of the field of scientometrics since the seventies (Russell & Rousseau, 2002)... Citation analysis results have also been used widely in scientific evaluation for purposes such as tenure and promotion of academics (Borgman & Furner, 2002)... However, the current tendency is for institutions to be graded more on the visibility of their products then on their long-term reputation or resources (Russell & Rousseau, 2002). Scopus and the JCR are major citation indexes that limit their records to those journals deemed by experts to be scholarly and significant to the journal’s given discipline (Bergman, 2012). Both are subscription based, generally to libraries. Other, freely available, citation indexes include CiteBase, CiteSeerX, Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search. JCR is considered to be one of the largest academic citation databases, containing over 46 million records relating to 11,261 high impact journals (Pleabani, 2010), including 1,400 journals that are open access (Zhang, Li, Liu, & Zeng, 2012). Scopus is also regarded to be large, with 46 million records (Delasalle, 2012) relating to 18,500 peer-reviewed journals (1,800 of them open access; Elsevier, 2012). It is worthy of note that these two databases register about10% of the open journals indexed in their respective databases. According to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), an authoritative listing of peer-reviewed scholarly open access journals... Authors can use the JISC-funded RoMEO, a searchable database of publisher’s policies with simple guidelines about how to publish self-archiving journal articles. JCR citation indices indicate that the number of times a document is downloaded in full text format from an electronic archive relates statistically to the number of times it is cited in other indexed journals. There is also evidence that the number of downloads influences citations, and that citations influence downloads (Moed, 2005). Interesting analyses on the relationship between citation and download can also be found for Citebase, an impact-ranked search service that indexes open access papers in ArXiv. Other research indicates that free access to scientific articles increases the number of resulting citations; open access academic articles are cited by peers more quickly than articles published in non-open access journals. Studies indicate that open academic publications are therefore likely to benefit science by accelerating the uptake of research findings and by maximising the impact of scientific production (Eysenbach, 2006;Piwowar, 2010; Wagner 2010;Borgman 2011, Norris, Oppenheim, & Rowland, 2008). A remarkable example of a repository of open access academic content is the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) ... SSRN has registered 56 million downloads to date, totalling 1,000,000 per month. The SSRN eLibrary has indexed 7.7 million references and 5.2 million citations. A few weeks ago UNESCO convened the World Open Educational Resources  Congress. One of its invited speakers was Harvard’s Lawrence Lessig – co-founder of Creative Commons – who explained that knowledge elites ought to ensure free access to content for those sections of the population who can’t pay for it. He emphasized that being a member of the academic community carries an obligation to enable access to one’s own work. Lessig also explained the importance of adopting new forms of access that remove unnecessary controls that are automatically built into the current system of publication...”