Professor Steven Tingay, Executive Director, Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy shares his experience with Open Access:
“In astronomy, and several other disciplines, Open Access is significantly boosted by the existence of arXiv, a large-scale repository for pre-prints. These are generally the versions of papers accepted for publication by journals. Further, astronomers have produced the Astrophysics Data Service (ADS), which indexes all journals and arXiv (more comprehensively than proprietary commercial index services). ADS also generates comprehensive bibliometrics information. These services greatly increase the visibility and accessibility of my work and the work of my team.
For example, ADS produces a daily digest of all papers indexed over the last 24 hours and sends it via email to thousands of astronomers world-wide. When my papers appear they are automatically disseminated widely. Of course, I also get to see what everyone around the world is publishing every day. This has led me to reach out to researchers with interesting papers, which has resulted in some of my most productive collaborations. The digest leads to an interesting effect – the papers are only given an ADS link, so we look at these lists of publications blind to the destination journal. This reduces effects such as journal bias.”
