How does access, or lack thereof (paper behind paywall), affect the influence a paper/researcher has? With sites like Researchgate.net, Academia.edu, Google Scholar, Arxiv.net, etc., journals are no longer as important, or unique, as they used to be. With open online access, papers can be read by many others, including practitioners and the general public who may apply learnings from the work. What makes a paper influential in 2015?
There are a lot claims that posting pre-press versions of papers on ResearchGate or Academia increases citations. Academia claims that it boosts citations by 73%. I don't know how they arrive at this claim, but they are using it in their marketing. Some people are including download statistics on their CVs now, so in some contexts this seems to be more relevant than the more traditional rankings like H index.
Its an interesting question that seems to be in flux at the moment.
Agree, Thomas. It is also interesting to see how the three popular academic sites (Google Scholar, Research Gate, and Academia) all have different citation counts for the same paper.
As a practitioner and researcher, I am happy when people read, and especially, download my work. I think those are much more useful indicators of the value of my work... but then again, I am not trying to get tenure, where the old rules still seem to dominate.
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