The effects of open access on un-published documents: A case study of economics working papers

The use of scholarly publications that have not been formally published in e.g. journals is widespread in some fields. In the past they have been disseminated through various channels of informal communication. However, the Internet has enabled dissemination of these unpublished and often unrefereed publications to a much wider audience. This is particularly interesting seen in relation to the highly disputed open access advantage as the potential advantage for low visibility publications has not been given much attention in the literature. The present study examines the role of working papers in economics during a ten-year period (1996 to 2005). It shows that working papers are increasingly becoming visible in the field specific databases. The impact of working papers is relatively low; however, high impact working paper series have citation rate levels similar to the low impact journals in the field. There is no tendency to an increase in impact during the ten years which is the case for the high impact journals. Consequently, the result of this study does not provide evidence of an open access advantage for working papers in economics. Introduction Open access (OA) based data sources provide new opportunities for performing citation analysis. They are interesting as an alternative to the traditional citation databases primarily due to coverage. OA based data sources are not restricted to journal articles as the traditional citation databases implying that some disciplines characterised by many e.g. working papers and monographs may be better analysed using a data source based on OA resources. However, the coverage of OA is not easily determined. The traditional citation indexes provide information on the indexing policy and the tools to examine it. OA based data sources may have an indexing policy but not necessarily and even if they do it can only be determined through cumbersome empirical investigations. OA based data sources are often based on authors self-archiving their