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Featured Story

Open Access Eliminates the Paywall for High-quality Research Articles

UWM Digital Commons Content Distribution

Open Access refers to the free, immediate, online availability of research articles as opposed to traditional subscription or ‘pay-wall’ models. A recent technological development in Web of Science, an online subscription-based multi-disciplinary citation indexing service available via the UWM Libraries, facilitates the discovery of over 4,000 UWM authored open access publications.

The research area of Astronomy/Astrophysics ranks first for open access availability on our campus. The majority of these freely accessible publications are attributed to LIGO and Virgo Scientific Collaboration, who made the first detection of gravitational waves, involving scientists from over 100 institutions including UWM.

The most cited of all records indexed in Web of Science affiliated with UWM is the open access article “Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger,” Abbott BP et al., February 11, 2016, Physical Review Letters  https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102

One documented advantage of open access publishing is higher citation counts for freely available papers. Indeed, UWM authored open access articles are on average cited more often than traditionally published articles.

More information about open access publishing at UWM and “citation advantage” is available in an article posted in UWM Digital Commons, "Finding Open Access Publications by UWM Authors."

Please contact Science Librarian, Svetlana Korolev, with questions about open access publishing and Web of Science.