Friends: Here is a letter we posted to SciDev.Net a few days ago. It was published two days ago. Please spread the word. Arun -------- Dear Editor, My colleagues and I have read with interest your news item, 'Open-access research makes a bigger splash', on the Gunther Eysenbach study on the impact of open access on citations. This is a welcome study, and is confirmation of a growing number of similar studies carried out since 2001, (eg http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html). It will be of interest to your readers that statistics becoming available now from journals published in developing countries are showing a similar very marked increase in usage following conversion to Open Access. For example, the journals distributed by the Brazil/Canada service, Bioline International, show a remarkable increase in full text paper downloads, rising from an average of about 2500 in 2004 to an average of 200,000 full papers per month since becoming OAI-compliant in January 2005, an eight-fold increase. The journals are from 16 developing countries (Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Egypt, Croatia, India, Iran, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Senegal, Turkey, Uganda, Venezuela - see http://www.bioline.org.br/journals, and the service is provided free-of-charge to authors, institutions and countries). It seems certain that the recovery of full papers will have a direct impact on the citation index as data becomes available. Similarly, the distribution service, MedKnow (http://www.medknow.com) managing biomedical journals in India, has found that as a result of converting to Open Access, accessions to full text papers have risen dramatically, the numbers of submissions has grown (and submissions are increasingly received from non-Indian authors), the citation index has reached over 1.0 for the first time for an Indian journal, and significantly the numbers of subscriptions have increased. As a result, the authors and the publishers are extremely pleased with the development. The MedKnow journals are also distributed through Bioline International. Although these statistics are not comparing the same papers available either OA or non-OA as in the PNAS study, but are comparing the journal usage before and after converting to OA, it is certainly clear that open access is creating a remarkable and hugely encouraging usage of research publications from developing countries. Further monitoring will continue and no doubt the pattern of usage, geographically and by discipline, will emerge as the OA environment beds down into common practice. We feel these findings may be of interest to readers of your news item and the authors of this letter can provide more detailed information if requested. Yours truly, Subbiah Arunachalam, MS Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai Vanderlei Canhos, Bioline International, Campinas, Brazil Leslie Chan, Bioline International, Toronto, Canada D K Sahu, MedKnow, Mumbai Barbara Kirsop, Electronic Publishing Trust for Development http://www.epublishingtrust.org Friends: Here is a letter we posted to SciDev.Net a few days ago. It was published two days ago. Please spread the word. Arun -------- Dear Editor, My colleagues and I have read with interest your news item, Open-access research makes a bigger splash , on the Gunther Eysenbach study on the impact of open access on citations. This is a welcome study, and is confirmation of a growing number of similar studies carried out since 2001, (eg http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html ). It will be of interest to your readers that statistics becoming available now from journals published in developing countries are showing a similar very marked increase in usage following conversion to Open Access. For example, the journals distributed by the Brazil/Canada service, Bioline International, show a remarkable increase in full text paper downloads, rising from an average of about 2500 in 2004 to an average of 200,000 full papers per month since becoming OAI-compliant in January 2005, an eight-fold increase. The journals are from 16 developing countries (Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Egypt, Croatia, India, Iran, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Senegal, Turkey, Uganda, Venezuela see http://www.bioline.org.br/journals http://www.bioline.org.br/journals , and the service is provided free-of-charge to authors, institutions and countries). It seems certain that the recovery of full papers will have a direct impact on the citation index as data becomes available. Similarly, the distribution service, MedKnow ( http://www.medknow.com/ http://www.medknow.com ) managing biomedical journals in India, has found that as a result of converting to Open Access, accessions to full text papers have risen dramatically, the numbers of submissions has grown (and submissions are increasingly received from non-Indian authors), the citation index has reached over 1.0 for the first time for an Indian journal, and significantly the numbers of subscriptions have increased. As a result, the authors and the publishers are extremely pleased with the development. The MedKnow journals are also distributed through Bioline International. Although these statistics are not comparing the same papers available either OA or non-OA as in the PNAS study, but are comparing the journal usage before and after converting to OA, it is certainly clear that open access is creating a remarkable and hugely encouraging usage of research publications from developing countries. Further monitoring will continue and no doubt the pattern of usage, geographically and by discipline, will emerge as the OA environment beds down into common practice. We feel these findings may be of interest to readers of your news item and the authors of this letter can provide more detailed information if requested. Yours truly, Subbiah Arunachalam, MS Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai Vanderlei Canhos, Bioline International, Campinas, Brazil Leslie Chan, Bioline International, Toronto, Canada D K Sahu, MedKnow, Mumbai Barbara Kirsop, Electronic Publishing Trust for Development http://www.epublishingtrust.org/ http://www.epublishingtrust.org