Although many authors believe that their work has a greater research impact if it is freely available, studies to demonstrate that impact are few. This study looks at articles in four disciplines at varying stages of adoption of open access—philosophy, political science, electrical and electronic engineering and mathematics—to see whether they have a greater impact as measured by citations in the ISI Web of Science database when their authors make them freely available on the Internet. The finding is that, across all four disciplines, freely available articles do have a greater research impact. Shedding light on this category of open access reveals that scholars in diverse disciplines are adopting open-access practices and being rewarded for it.

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Do Open-Access Articles Have a Greater Research Impact?

Table of Contents Preface - origins of and rationale for the book Setting the scene Ch 1Introduction a. Overview b. The context of modern education c. The nature of educational technology d. Today's learners e. The need for a new learning design methodology f. Audience and structure of the book g. The process of writing the book Ch 2 Design languages. a. Introduction b. The challenges of designing for learning c. Design languages d. Design notation in music, architecture and chemistry i. Musical notation ii. Architectural notation iii. Chemical notation e. Learning design i. Defining learning design ii. The origins of learning design iii. A spectrum of learning design languages f. Origins of the Open Learning Design methodology i. The OU Learning Design Initiative ii. Design-Based Research iii. The OULDI learning design methodology g. Conclusion Ch 3: Related research fields a. Introduction b. Instructional Design c. Learning Sciences d. Learning objects and Open Educational Practices e. Pedagogical Patterns f. Professional networks and support centres g. Conclusion Ch 4: Open, social and participatory media a. Introduction b. The changing digital landscape of education c. A review of new technologies i. The characteristics of new technologies ii. The impact of Web 2.0 technologies iii. The use of Web 2.0 technologies in education iv. The impact on practice d. A review of Web 2.0 tools and practice e. Conclusion Theoretical perspectives Ch 5 Theory and methodology in learning design research a. Introduction b. Definitions c. Researchers' home disciplines d. The nature of theory e. Theoretical perspectives i. Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) ii. Communities of Practice iii. Actor Network Theory iv. Cybernetics and systems thinking a. Methodological approaches i. Content analysis ii. Ethnography iii. Case studies iv. Action research v. Evaluation vi. Choosing an appropriate methodology b. Influences, beliefs and theoretical perspectives c. Conclusion Ch 6 The role of Mediating Artifacts in learning design a. Introduction b. The origins of the concept of Mediating Artifacts c. Capturing and representing practice d. Examples of Mediating Artifacts e. Understanding learning activities through Mediating Artifacts f. Meta-Mediating Artifacts g. An illustrative example of the application of this approach i. Teacher A: The design phase ii. Learner A: Use Scenario 1 - beginner's route iii. Learner B: Use Scenario 2 - advanced route iv. Teacher B: Use Scenario 3 - repurposing h. Conclusion Ch 7 Affordances a. Introduction b. Definitions of the term c. ICT affordances i. Collaboration ii. Reflection iii. Interaction iv. Dialogue v. Creativity vi. Organization vii. Inquiry viii. Authenticity ix. Negative affordances - constraints a. Conclusion Design representations and tools Ch 8 Design representations a. Introduction b. Types of representation c. Examples of different types of representations i. Textual ii. Content map iii. The course map view iv. The pedagogy profile v. The task swimlane representation vi. Learning outcomes map vii. The course dimensions view viii. Principles/pedagogy matrix d. Evaluation of the views e. An example of application of the representations i. Course view ii. Pedagogical profile iii. Course dimensions iv. Learning outcomes v. Task swimlane f. Conclusion Ch 9 Case study: tools for visualizing designs a. Introduction b. Practitioners' approaches to design c. Repurposing an Open Educational Resource d. The development of Compendium LD e. Evaluation of the use of Compendium LD f. Use by practitioners g. Use by students h. Other visualization tools i. Conclusion Ch 10 Pedagogical planners a. Introduction b. The need for pedagogical planners c. Examples of pedagogical planners i. The DialogPlus toolkit ii. Phoebe iii. The London Pedagogical Planner (LPP) iv. The Learning Design Support Environment (LDSE) d. Conclusion Openness Ch 11 The nature of openness a. Introduction b. Facets of openness i. Open design ii. Open delivery iii. Open evaluation iv. Open research c. Principles d. Defining openness e. Characteristics of openness f. The OU's Supported Open Learning (SOL) model g. Applying openness i. Open design ii. Open delivery iii. Open evaluation iv. Open research h. Conclusion Ch 12 Open Educational Resources a. Introduction b. The Open Educational Resource movement c. A review of OER initiatives d. Case study 1: Openlearn e. Case study 2: Wikiwijs f. Case study 3: LeMill g. Case study 4: Podcampus h. Conclusion i. Appendix: The broader OER landscape Ch 13 Case study: Realising the vision of Open Educational Resources a. Introduction b. The Olnet initiative c. The OPAL initiative i. Strategies and policies ii. Quality assurance models iii. Collaborative and partnership modles iv. Tools and tool practices v. Innovations vi. Skills development and support vii. Business models and sustainability strategies viii. Barriers and enablers d. Enhancing the quality and innovation of OER e. Conclusion Social and participatory media Ch 14: Online communities and interactions a. Introduction b. The co-evolution of tools and practice c. Modes of interaction d. The changing nature of online communities e. The pedagogies of e-learning f. Sfard's metaphors of learning g. Frameworks for supporting online communities h. The Community Indicators Framework i. Conclusion Ch 15 Case study: Cloudworks a. Introduction b. Cloudworks c. Theoretical underpinnings d. Evaluation of the OU Learning and Teaching Cloudscape e. Using Cloudworks to support learning Conclusion Ch 16 Conclusion, implications and reflections Postscript - reflections on adopting an open approach to the writing of the book

Designing for learning in an open world

Crystallography is no longer solely the preserve of the specialist, a situation that has implications for the operation of crystallographic service facilities. This mini-review provides an overview of the challenges in operating a crystallographic facility from the perspective and experience of the UK National Crystallography Service – a modern mid-range facility. Examples of chemical research generating the greatest challenges for the modern crystallography service and the state-of-the-art tools, hardware, facilities and expertise that are required to address them are highlighted. An overview of current research trends in single crystal diffraction research, which will ensure the future development of the technique, is presented. The remit of the service crystallographer is examined, together with proposed examples of best practice.

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Changing and challenging times for service crystallography

Informetrics at the beginning of the 21st century—A review

One of the primary outputs of the scientific enterprise is data, but many institutions such as libraries that are charged with preserving and disseminating scholarly output have largely ignored this form of documentation of scholarly activity. This paper focuses on a particularly troublesome class of data, termed dark data . “Dark data” is not carefully indexed and stored so it becomes nearly invisible to scientists and other potential users and therefore is more likely to remain underutilized and eventually lost. The article discusses how the concepts from long-tail economics can be used to understand potential solutions for better curation of this data. The paper describes why this data is critical to scientific progress, some of the properties of this data, as well as some social and technical barriers to proper management of this class of data. Many potentially useful institutional, social, and technical solutions are under development and are introduced in the last sections of the paper, but these solutions are largely unproven and require additional research and development.

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Shedding Light on the Dark Data in the Long Tail of Science

The speed of scientific communication — the rate of ideas affecting other researchers' ideas — is increasing dramatically. The factor driving this is free, unrestricted access to research papers. Measurements of user activity in mature eprint archives of research papers such as arXiv have shown, for the first time, the degree to which such services support an evolving network of texts commenting on, citing, classifying, abstracting, listing and revising other texts. The Open Citation project has built tools to measure this activity, to build new archives, and has been closely involved with the development of the infrastructure to support open access on which these new services depend. This is the story of the project, intertwined with the concurrent emergence of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). The paper describes the broad scope of the project's work, showing how it has progressed from early demonstrators of reference linking to produce Citebase, a Web-based citation and impact-ranked search service, and how it has supported the development of the EPrints.org software for building OAI-compliant archives. The work has been underpinned by analysis and experiments on the semantics of documents (digital objects) to determine the features required for formally perfect linking — instantiated as an application programming interface (API) for reference linking — that will enable other applications to build on this work in broader digital library information environments.

Open Citation Linking: The Way Forward

The U.K. National Crystallography Service (NCS) has developed a prototype e-science infrastructure for the provision of a small molecule crystallography service from sample receipt to results dissemination. This paper outlines the two strands of this service, which (a) enable a user to contribute in the conduction of an experiment and (b) provide an effective route for the archival and dissemination of the arising results. Access to use the NCS facilities and expertise and a mechanism to submit samples is granted through a secure Grid infrastructure, which seamlessly provides instantaneous feedback and the ability to remotely monitor and guide diffraction experiments and stage the diffraction data to a securely accessible location. Publication of all the data and results generated during the course of the experiment, from processed data to analyzed structures, is then enabled by means of an open access data repository. The repository publishes its content through established digital libraries' protocols, which enable harvester and aggregator services to make the data searchable and accessible.

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An e-science environment for service crystallography--from submission to dissemination.

Intuitively, if a product is useful and has both a priced and a free version its total usage rate would be expected to be higher than if there is only a priced version Evidence is emerging that this is true for online research journal papers Authors need accessible online sites in which to deposit their published papers, and users need a means of discovering and evaluating those papers The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) has now produced free software packages for building OAI-compliant institutional archives and OAI search services, including a citation-ranked search and impact discovery service New data from this service shows that higher usage of free papers leads directly to a higher number of citations and thus greater research impact Institutional archives need far more papers to be deposited, and one way of bringing this about is to implement institutional and national policies mandating the self-archiving of all funded research output in open access archives This paper outlines why such policies are beneficial to researchers, their institutions, funders, and to research itself

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The impact of OAI-based search on access to research journal papers

In the open world of the (Semantic) web, a world where increasingly diverse materials from disparate sources of different qualities are being made available, an automatic mechanism for the provision of provenance information of these sources is needed. This paper describes voidp, a provenance extension for the void vocabulary, that allows data publishers to specify the provenance relationships of their data. We enumerate voidp's classes and properties, and describe a use case scenario. A wider uptake of voidp by dataset publishers will allow data consuming tools to take advantage of these metadata providing consumers with the origin, i.e., the provenance, of what is being consumed.

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Tracing the provenance of linked data using voiD

This paper includes an overview of the changing landscape of scholarly communication and describes outcomes from the innovative eBank UK project, which seeks to build links from e-research through to e-learning. As introduction, the scholarly knowledge cycle is described and the role of digital repositories and aggregator services in linking data-sets from Grid-enabled projects to e-prints through to peer-reviewed articles as resources in portals and Learning Management Systems, are assessed. The development outcomes from the eBank UK project are presented including the distributed information architecture, requirements for common ontologies, data models, metadata schema, open linking technologies, provenance and workflows. Some emerging challenges for the future are presented in conclusion.

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Christopher Gutteridge

Papers

Open Citation Linking: The Way Forward

An e-science environment for service crystallography--from submission to dissemination.

The impact of OAI-based search on access to research journal papers

Tracing the provenance of linked data using voiD

eBank UK: linking research data, scholarly communication and learning