Tove Faber Frandsen's Ph.D dissertation, "Scholarly CommunicationCchanging: The Implications of Open Access," is now available.
Here's an excerpt:
The dissertation aims at investigating the changing scholarly communication in general and more specifically the implications of open access on scholarly communication. The overall research question is: What are the effects of open access on scholarly communication? The dissertation consists of five empirical studies of various aspects of the implications of open access on scholarly communication.
The five studies, published as journal articles, are bibliometric studies conducted on three different levels. The first level consists of two studies of a general, more explorative character. The first general study analyses the coverage of open access base resources and the second the use of open access journals in the sciences. The next level of analysis consists of two specific studies that look into two widespread assumptions of the implications of open access. The first is the assumption that the developing countries are great beneficiaries of open access and the second is the belief that open access causes more citations. The third level consists of a concluding, perspectival study. The levels in the thesis to some extent also follow the chronological order of the studies.