The Research Impact and Online Access
Providing other scientists or scholars with access to your research output allows them to refer to and build upon your work. The impact of a researcher's work
- determines the size of the research contribution to further research in the field
- generates further research funding
- contributes to the research productivity and financial support of the researcher's institution
- advances the researcher's career
- promotes research progress in the field
The consequences of research impact are summed up in the phrase publish or perish.
However, journal subscriptions form a toll-access barrier which reduces the number of institutions and researchers who can obtain any particular published article and hence diminishes the potential impact of published research.
Placing material online (creating so-called eprints) restores access and hence impact, as recent research shows.
There are an average of 336% more citations to online articles compared to offline articles (published in the same venue). Lawrence, S. (2001) Free online availability substantially increases a paper's impact Nature 411 (6837): 521
In other words, papers which are not visible to the browsers of the world's researchers are effectively invisible.