QUT ePrints : Citation rate boost

In early 2005 Professor Ray Frost began uploading postprint versions of his journal articles to QUT ePrints at http://eprints.qut.edu.au.  When he saw how frequently they were being accessed, he uploaded some of his older publications (from 2000-2004) and now has over 350 of his publications in the repository. Professor Frost says he has found that it actually saves him time as it only takes him around 5 minutes to upload each paper and he now has far fewer emails requesting free copies of his work.

However, the best return on his investment (of time) has been the phenomenal growth in his citation rate since 2005 (as indicated in Web of Science).Ray Frost is convinced that the dramatic increase in his citation rate is due to the open access copies of his papers that now supplement the journal versions. Since 2005, the postprint versions of his articles have been downloaded over 174,000 times; including 115,866 downloads in the last 12 months.  Most of his repository records include a ‘doi’ link to the published version of the fulltext, but these links are only useful to people with a subscription to the journal or the database (eg ScienceDirect).  Therefore, it is probably safe to conclude that most of the people who downloaded copies of Professor Frost’s articles would otherwise not have had access to his work – and that some of these additional readers went on to cite his work in their own publications (hence, the increased citation rate).