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There is now considerable evidence that making a refereed publication openly accessible on the Internet (whether on a personal website, an institutional website or an OAI-compliant institutional repository) increases the research impact of the publication. Citations are measured to increase by 25% to 250% (depending on the discipline) compared to papers in the same journal but not open access. Downloads of the full text can also be measured (of course only for online articles), and there is a growing body of evidence that downloads translate into citations after a delay; there is even some evidence of citations of works appearing before the journal issue in which they appear is published!
Some of this enhanced impact is derived from a competitive advantage (online works are more likely to be cited since they are more accessible than others), but not all. A citation benefit will remain even when open access archiving approaches 100% since researchers will have greater access to the literature to choose the best works to cite, rather than selecting only from those from journals that their institution can afford. No institution in the world can afford all the world’s journals.
The following works are listed as primary sources so you can convince yourself of this key argument. Research impact is the principal reason universities are rapidly moving to establish open access repositories for their research output: it positions them better in relation to their competitors, be they in New Zealand or internationally. Researchers too benefit when greater use is made of their work. If it is not cited, was it worth doing? The only refuge is in hoping it was made use of in another way.
Antelman K (2004). Do Open-Access Articles have a Greater Research Impact?. College and Research Libraries 65(5):372–382
Bollen J, de Sompel HV, Smith JA, Luce R (2005). Toward alternative metrics of journal impact: A comparison of download and citation data. Information Processing & Management 41(6): 1419–1440.
Brody, T., Harnad, S. and Carr, L. (2005) Earlier Web Usage Statistics as Predictors of Later Citation Impact. Journal of the American Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST).
Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y., Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H. and Hilf, E. (2004) The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access Serials Review Vol. 30, No. 4, 310–314
Kurtz MJ, Eichhorn G, Accomazzi A, Grant C, Demleitner M, Henneken E, Murray SS (2005). The effect of use and access on citations. Information Processing & Management 41(6): 1395–1402.
Lawrence, S. (2001) Online or Invisible?, Nature 411 (2001) (6837), p. 521 .