Queensland University of Technology is leading the world in open access to research papers and Professor Ray Frost is at the vanguard.
QUT was one of the world's first research institution to provide cost-free open access to electronic copies of peer-reviewed research journal articles and conference papers for everyone through QUT ePrints, available at http://eprints.qut.edu.au.
A staggering 50,000 downloads of Professor Frost's papers have been made in the past year by people around the world which has helped him achieve more than 4000 citations in the past 12 months.
Professor Frost, from QUT's School of Physical and Chemical Sciences, is a prolific author and has more than 250 papers in which he is the lead or co researcher available on QUT's ePrints.
"The few moments it takes to deposit a paper onto ePrints is well rewarded," Professor Frost said.
"Obviously, for a researcher the more people who can read your research, the more likely your work is to be cited. Eprints allows research to reach a range of interested people well beyond a journal's subscription base.
"For the research community in general it is a fantastic resource, because it is too costly for university libraries to subscribe to every journal."
He said it saved time and money because people could download papers free of charge.
"And you don't have to package up hard copies of papers to post," he said.
"QUT ePrints is fantastic for teaching because students can find out an academic's research areas and it helps with their own learning."
QUT e-Research access coordinator Paula Callan said QUT was the first university in Australia and only second in the world to endorse a university-wide policy of depositing to ePrints.
"QUT academics have really got behind this initiative and, as a result, QUT ePrints can provide open access to a significantly higher proportion of our research publication output than the repositories at other Australian universities. Inevitably, this will bear fruit in terms of increasing the citations for these articles," Ms Callan said.
"All researchers have to do is deposit their final corrected draft version of their journal articles and conference papers in QUT ePrints and the library will check the publisher's copyright policy, and include a link to the copy-edited version of the paper on the publisher's website.
"Eprint records can also be created for books. While we cannot make the full-text of books open access, unless the author owns the copyright, the 'Googleability' of eprint records really gets the work noticed."
"QUT is always looking for ways to improve the service in order to remove the barriers to access that could be unnecessarily restricting the number of times QUT-authored articles are cited."
Media contact: Niki Widdowson, QUT media officer, 07 3138 1841 or n.widdowson@qut.edu.au.
