Better visibility for researchers’ scholarship: when articles are publicly available, researchers’ scholarship is available to anyone who might search for it. That means more readers, more recognition, and more impact for each article. In fact, recent studies have shown that open-access articles are cited by other authors more frequently than comparable articles that aren’t openly available.
Avoiding duplication: no researcher wants to waste time and money conducting a study if they know it has been attempted elsewhere. But, duplication of effort is all-too-possible when researchers can’t effectively communicate with one another and make results known to others in their field and beyond.
