Open Access: 100 Stories of Impact

Impact is a frequently used, but rarely defined term. This is especially true in the field of open access and scholarly communication. What do we mean when we talk about the impact of open access? What do we measure and why? At bepress we are working on a project that aims to answer these questions and show how that information might be useful for libraries and institutions.

Over the years, we’ve amassed a large set of data, drawn from your success stories, Digital Commons and Author Dashboards, and other measurement tools, that demonstrate the impact of sharing work open access.  From this collection we’ve selected 100 examples that demonstrate concrete outcomes. For example:

• Pitzer College student Mary C. Ferguson was invited to join the board of a Los Angeles environmental non-profit group after her senior thesis on sediment removal was found on Scholarship@Claremont in an online search.
• Utah State University Physics professor J.R. Dennison was contacted by a local business with a NASA/U.S. Airforce contract and succeeded in forging an ongoing partnership that opened up a commercial application for his work.
• Recent articles in The Guardian, Open Culture and other media sites have given over 20,000 readers access to University of Wollongong’s archive of OZ Magazine, which has been referred to as the most controversial magazine of the sixties.

While the stories in themselves are striking, when we looked at the entire dataset, some clear categories emerged. Below you’ll find a framework that maps out these categories and organizes them in relation to the person or group experiencing the benefit: the reader, the author, or the institution.  We found that for each group, there was an overarching theme to the benefit.  For readers who discover open access materials online this can be described as the benefit of “advancing knowledge.”  Authors benefit from having a much broader readership and “building reputation” for their work. Finally, institutions which provide the mechanism for open access through their repositories reap the benefit of being able to “demonstrate achievement” that their investments and program have enabled.

Overall we identified 100 examples of impact, but we know that there are a lot more. Over the next few months we’ll be looking more closely at our data and will present our findings on impact in  the fall.  View our webinar, Open Access: 100 Stories of Impact, to learn more.

We hope that creating a framework like this will be a useful resource to the community. But we want to hear what you think. Do you have stories of impact to share with us? How would you use a framework such as this? What other kinds of information or data points would be useful to you? Email us at outreach@bepress.com to give us your feedback and stories of impact. We look forward to hearing from you.