Online or Invisible

Stephen Carlson (Hypotyposeis blog entry) draws attention to a very interesting article:

Steve Lawrence, "Online or Invisible"

This is reproduced from Nature, Volume 411, Number 6837, p. 521, 2001 and provides research from the area of computer science and related disciplines that "More highly cited articles, and more recent articles, are substantially more likely to be freely available on the web". It's an effective plea to scholars to make their research available on-line. I'd add from my own experience that while it's generally not welcome to put your books on-line, publishers are more than happy to allow one to reproduce one's academic articles on-line. And by doing so there is no question that you get a far, far wider audience than if you only allow it to remain in the journal or collection in which it first appeared. So let me echo Stephen Carlson's exhortation to academics to make their work available on-line; it's not just the wider academic community but you yourselves who will benifit.