The Open Access (OA) Advantage : the evidence

The keynote talk of MEDNET 2005 was a presentation of Gunther Eysenbach, Associate Professor Department of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, University of Toronto; and Senior Scientist, Division of Medical Decision Making and Health Care Research. He conducted a decent research to find out if articles published in Open Access are more likely to be cited (more often and earlier) then non-OA articles. In a very clear way, although with a little basic statistics, he explained his research method and the results. Taking into account every possible factor that can be significantly important, the results show that there is a difference in favour of the OA articles. The talk was explenatory about the difference between the GOLD way and the GREEN way. In his opinion the research conducted by the OPCIT Project is mainly focussed on the GREEN way (the so-called "back-door") and he wanted to show independantly that the GOLD way is the " better" one. The research wil be published shortly in "his" OA Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), but perhaps the presentation will be available also shortly.