Colleagues, At last some facts instead of hype. I'm a believer in Open Access but my own research has shown that hype and reality were seriously out of step.
This study can be summarised thus: There is no difference between standard and OA sci/tech journals in terms of citation pattern, the only important factor is the quality of the article, not how it is published. With a little thought it is easy to see why this is the case. Those people who cite articles (as distinct from those who merely read them), i.e., academic researchers, already have access to the standard journals in their subject so open access makes little difference to them. So for hard sci/tech (and probably socsci and hums) subjects we can forget the arguments about more citations (that doesn't preclude the possibility of greater readership though). Since we now know there is no difference between OA and standard journals in terms of citation and quality (if an article has quality it will be equally cited in whichever form it is published) then the only variables left are cost and acceptability. Again since the citation patterns are similar the first test of acceptability seems to have been passed since OA journals are being read and quality articles are being published in them. So we are just left with cost - this has many variables, e.g., do we count the cost of the technology needed to access OA journals, do we take into account the money saved from not needing to archive hardcopy, will we accept the movement of money from subscriptions to up front refereeing fees, do we count the savings in subscription maintenance, etc? However complicated the calculation if my interpretation is correct we can forget arguing about which is the better form of publication and just ask which is the cheapest :-) . Regards, John Smith, The Templeman Library, University of Kent.