Increase your visibility
Be
open
and
get
more
citations,
page
views,
downloads,
and
media
attention
for
your
research.
It’s important, especially for early-career researchers, to build a name for themselves. For that, your work has to be seen, read, and cited. Sharing your work can make that happen.
Be open → Get more citations!
Numerous studies have shown that publishing openly – whether in an OA journal, or self-archiving in an open repository – confers a citation advantage.
Article sharing
Manuscripts posted in open repositories prior to formal publication are called preprints. Preprints start gathering citations earlier and maintain a citation advantage over articles published only in traditional journals for months or years to come.
And it's not just one study. The Open Access Citation Advantage Service, maintained by SPARC Europe, keeps an up-to-date list of relevant citation studies and summaries of their results. To date, the majority of studies find a significant citation advantage of publishing openly.
The open access citation advantage holds for diverse fields, with maximum percent increases in citations from 36-600%!
Data sharing
Studies that share their data openly tend to get more citations than studies that do not make their data available.
Code sharing
Sharing code can also lead to more citations, as shown in this 2012 study by Patrick Vandewalle (free version here [pdf]).
Be open → get more readers
Open access articles get more tweeters and Mendeley readers than paywalled articles published in the same journal.
Open access articles receive more page views than non-OA articles.
