Anecdotal evidence
It is often said that making your work available in an open access repository like ORO provides wider exposure to your research and a better chance of being well cited. I firmly believe this, and I refer again to a recent study that seems to support this hypothesis. More peer-reviewed research from information scientists and bibliometricians is certainly needed, but there is also a lot to be said for anecdotal evidence as well.
Ray Frost is Professor of Inorganic Materials in the School of Physical & Chemical Sciences at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia. In a recent post on QUT’s Library News for the School of IT we read that Professor Frost has found that regularly depositing his work in QUT ePrints (QUT’s equivalent of ORO) actually saves him time, simply because he no longer has to deal with numerous requests by email for individual personal copies of his papers. Furthermore, the amount of citations Professor Frost’s work receives has increased markedly since 2005, which also happens to be the year he began to make his work available open access through QUT ePrints.
So, depositing a record of your publications in ORO is good, but attaching the full text as well is even better. We always provide a link to the published version, but this is only of use to people who have a subscription to the journal in which you have published, either personally or through their institution. Just because we are lucky enough to have access to a vast number of journals here at the OU, that doesn’t mean to say University X down the road or University Y overseas will. Depositing the full text of your research in ORO breaks down subscription barriers and opens it up to many more people that otherwise would never have been able to read it. And, as suggested by Professor Frost, you may also subsequently reap the rewards in terms of citations as well.