The Beauty of Open Access: Playing with Data

Lars Juhl Jensen at Buried Treasure offers an analytical blog post following up on data released by PLoS. Jensen took these article level metrics and filtered them by categories such as bookmarks, citations, downloads, and more. Among his results, Jensen writes, "the strong correlations between Downloads and other metrics disappear almost completely after normalization. I think this adds an interesting twist to the debate on whether Open Access papers are more likely to be cited than other papers." He adds, "Ratings correlates very poorly with every other metric. Combined with the low number of ratings, this makes me wonder if the option to rate papers on the journal web sites is all that useful."