Search engines increase online journal use more than open access

doi:10.1136/bmj.332.7554.1353

BMJ 2006;332:1353 (10 June), doi:10.1136/bmj.332.7554.1353

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Search engines increase online journal use more than open access

London Susan Mayor

The ability of internet search engines to find journal articles has considerably increased the readership of academic journals, a detailed analysis of the internet use of one particular research journal has found.

Introducing open access publishing achieved a smaller additional increase in journal use, the analysis showed.

Researchers at the Centre for Publishing at University College London used a deep log analysis, which collects “digital fingerprints” of users of specific internet sites, to track use of the online version of Nucleic Acids Research. They assessed use before and after the journal introduced an “author pays” open access publishing system, in which authors pay a fee to cover the cost of publishing their paper, which is then made available for free to readers. This was the first time that this technique had been employed to analyse the use of a single academic journal.

The analysis found that . . . [Full text of this article]

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