Research Repository UCD: Visibility and Impact

Our guide to Research Repository UCD

Increased Citations, Impact, Visibility, Downloads

Uploading to Research Repository UCD means that your research becomes universally accessible on the Internet and searchable through Google and Google Scholar.

The School of Civil Engineering started uploading items to the Repository in 2009. They now have a total of 587 items there, with download rates increasing year on year.

Research indicates that making your publications open access can significantly increase your chances of being cited; see for example a review of the research in this area by Alma Swan:

Swan, A. (2010) The Open Access citation advantage: studies and results to date. Technical Report, School of Electronics & Computer Science, University of Southampton.

RESEARCH IMPACT OF PAYWALLED VERSUS OPEN ACCESS PAPERS

This research presents data from the 1science oaIndx on the average of relative citations (ARC) for 3.3 million papers published from 2007 to 2009 and indexed in the Web of Science (WoS). These data show a decidedly large citation advantage for open access (OA) papers, despite them suffering from a lag in availability compared to paywalled papers.

FINDINGS:

Publishing in paywalled journals without green archiving is never an effective impact maximization strategy
In total, and for all these fields, publishing in paywalled journals with no additional green archiving always yields below average citedness (the average being 1.0).
Publishing in paywalled journals is the least impactful strategy overall, and the least impactful in 16 out of 22 fields.
On average, open access papers produce a 50% higher research impact than strictly paywalled papers.
In all these fields, fostering open access (without distinguishing between gold and green) is always a better research impact maximization strategy than relying on strictly paywalled papers.
Having a green copy of a paper is the most impactful research communication strategy overall and the best strategy in 19 fields out of 22.
Green is nearly always more effective than relying strictly on gold (20 out of 22 fields).
Gold is the best strategy in biology and biomedical research and very close to green in clinical medicine (likely a reflection of the NIH and Wellcome Trust OA mandates).
Gold has the least impact in six fields.

The full article: Research Impact of Paywalled versus Open Access Papers, is available at https://www.1science.com/1numbr/