UWM Libraries are celebrating 2018 International Open Access Week, October 22-28. This year’s theme is “designing equitable foundations for open knowledge,” underscoring the value of making scholarship more open and inclusive.
Open Access refers to the free, immediate, online availability of research articles as opposed to traditional subscription or ‘pay-wall’ models. A recent technological development in Web of Science, an online subscription-based multi-disciplinary citation indexing service available via the UWM Libraries, facilitates the discovery of over 4,000 UWM authored open access publications.
The research area of Astronomy/Astrophysics ranks first for open access availability on our campus. The majority of these freely accessible publications are attributed to LIGO and Virgo Scientific Collaboration, who made the first detection of gravitational waves, involving scientists from over 100 institutions including UWM.
The most cited of all records indexed in Web of Science affiliated with UWM is the open access article “Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger,” Abbott BP et al., February 11, 2016, Physical Review Letters: https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102
One documented advantage of open access publishing is higher citation counts for freely available papers. Indeed, UWM authored open access articles are on average cited more often than traditionally published articles.
More information about open access publishing at UWM and “citation advantage” is available in an article posted in UWM Digital Commons: https://dc.uwm.edu/lib_staffart/12/
Please contact Science Librarian Svetlana Korolev (skorolev@uwm.edu) with questions about open access publishing and Web of Science.