Constructing experimental indicators for open access documents

The ongoing paradigm change in the scholarly publication system makes it necessary to construct alternative evaluation criteria/metrics which appropriately take into account the unique characteristics of electronic publications and other research output in digital formats. Today, major parts of scholarly open access (OA) publications and the self-archiving area are not well covered in traditional citation and indexing databases. The growing share and importance of freely accessible research output demands new approaches/metrics for measuring and evaluating these new types of scientific publication. We propose a simple quantitative method which establishes indicators by measuring the access/download pattern of OA documents and other web entities of a single web server. The experimental indicators are constructed, based on standard local web usage data. This new type of web-based indicator is developed to model the specific demand for better study/evaluation of the accessibility, visibility and interlinking of open accessible documents. We conclude that escience will need new stable e-indicators. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.