OpenAccess Statistics: Alternative Impact Measures for Open Access documents? An examination how to generate interoperable usage information from distributed Open Access services

摘要

Publishing and bibliometric indicators are of utmost relevance for scientists and research institutions as theimpact or importance of a publication (or even of a scientist or an institution) is mostly regarded to be equivalentto a citation-based indicator, e.g. in form of the Journal Impact Factor or the Hirsch-Index. Both on an individualand an institutional level performance measurement depends strongly on these impact scores. This contributionshows that most common methods to assess the impact of scientific publications often discriminate Open Accesspublications – and by that reduce the attractiveness of Open Access for scientists. Assuming that the motivationto use Open Access publishing services (e.g. a journal or a repository) would increase if these services wouldconvey some sort of reputation or impact to the scientists, alternative models of impact are discussed. Prevailingresearch results indicate that alternative metrics based on usage information of electronic documents are suitableto complement or to relativize citation-based indicators. Furthermore an insight into the project OpenAccess-Statistics OA-S is given. OA-S implemented an infrastructure to collect document-related usage informationfrom distributed Open Access Repositories in an aggregator service in order to generate interoperable documentaccess information according to three standards (COUNTER, LogEc and IFABC). The service also guaranteesthe deduplication of users and identical documents on different servers. In a second phase it is not only plannedto implement added services like recommender