Open accessibility to information systems research articles

With increasing frequency journal articles are retrieved digitally rather than by obtaining physical printed volumes. This shift to low-cost distribution of research literature has opened up new possibilities for increasing the accessibility and potential readership of published literature. Open Access is a term used to refer to publication of scholarly material without access restrictions, which can be realized either by the publisher directly or indirectly by the author. This paper studies the extent to which information systems research is available Open Access. The results are also contrasted to figures from other areas of science. By sampling journals within the field, systematically looking for free copies through a web search engine, the extent of peer-reviewed IS research was studied. The results indicate that none of the IS journals included in a large citation indexing service covering 18000 journals are fully Open Access, but this is something which is compensated for by authors being quite active in uploading copies of their manuscripts to web sites. There was no significant difference in Open Access patterns between the top journals in the discipline and the rest of the sample. The overall share of Open Access within the field is 21 %.