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The impact of open access publishing (and other access initiatives) on use and users of digital scholarly journals
Author(s) -
NICHOLAS David,
HUNTINGTON Paul,
JAMALI Hamid R.
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
learned publishing
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.06
H-Index - 34
eISSN - 1741-4857
pISSN - 0953-1513
DOI - 10.1087/095315107779490599
Subject(s) - quarter (canadian coin) , publishing , order (exchange) , scholarly communication , open access publishing , library science , electronic publishing , digital library , political science , world wide web , computer science , business , history , art , the internet , law , poetry , archaeology , finance , literature
ABSTRACT Oxford University Press moved one of its most prestigious journals, Nucleic Acids Research (NAR) , to a full open access (OA), author‐pays publishing model in January 2005. A deep log analysis study was carried out in order to determine the impact of this move to OA on the use and users of the journal. Surprisingly the findings showed that although there was a 143% increase in use from early 2003 to January 2005, it was search engines and robots that accounted for a high proportion of the increased use. Robots were responsible for half of sessions in the second quarter of 2005, compared to 1% in the second quarter of 2003.