Statistics of Open Access Journals

Abstract

The exponential growth of e-journal access and downloads has strongly enhanced the role of statistical data, in order to evaluate the use of resources and define subscription acquisition strategies and their management. On one hand, the automatic data harvesting performed by computers provides statistics, but on the other hand it does not guarantee the comparability and harmonisation of collected data. Therefore, the process of statistical data formulation has to be supported by the use of standards - the most important being “counter” which is gradually becoming the de facto in this field. That could permit the merging of obtained results from different systems. Furthermore, all the main commercial publishers regularly supply reliable statistics unlike Open Access resource suppliers and aggregators, with the exception of BioMed Central, that does provide statistics. All this could have some negative implications for decision makers that do not have a suitable system to choose between Open Access and equivalent or similar non Open Access resources. Recent studies have established that Open Access articles have an IF and a citation level higher than the others. It should be fundamental to verify the use of Open Access periodicals compared to the non Open Access ones in the same fields. If the results of this analysis are in favour of Open Access journals, these could become an important factor for the success of the Open Access initiative in terms of reducing library expenditure for serials. The access identification of journals through the user IP address is a globally adopted method and easy to apply, therefore it could bring about a significant increase in the diffusion of Open Access periodicals.