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BY SHARON SHINN T wo forces that have the power to change the reach and impact of business research are the open access publishing movement and the increased willingness of academics to post research on blogs and social media sites. What they have in com- mon is electronic delivery and the ability to reach a wide audience almost instantly. Where they differ is in how much of that information is offered in each format. ■ Open access (OA) publishing puts whole articles in the hands of interested readers by allowing any- one to read any academic article without having to pay to do so. In traditional academic pub- lishing, journals accept papers, publish them, and sell content to subscribers. "That business model is reversed in OA publishing, in which authors pay journals for perform- ing the service of publishing their research," explains Bo-Christer Björk, professor of information sys- tems science at Hanken School of Econonmics in Helsinki, Finland. Among the various tiers of open access publishing are gold OA, in which the author pays a set fee to make his work in a specific journal free for anyone to read; green OA, in which the author takes the man- uscript of a published article and archives it on a personal or uni- versity website, where it is openly available; and the delayed model, in which journal papers are avail- able for free after a set period of time, usually six to twelve months. "Today, about 8,000 publish- ers follow a hybrid model," says Björk. "They're subscription journals, but they'll make articles wholly open if the author pays the fee, usually about US$3,000." He estimates that of all the articles indexed in Scopus—Elsevier's data- base of the abstracts of articles in peer-reviewed journals—about 13 percent to 14 percent are OA. ■ On the other hand, social media like Facebook and Twitter generally offer up smaller bits of information, such as specific nug- gets of data or links to abstracts and publications. This can be highly effective, too, as the Lon- don School of Economics and Political Science well knows. The school maintains a blog called the "Impact of Social Sciences," where diverse contributors provide social media insights. For instance, one of papers linked to the site discusses "Using Twitter in university research, teaching and impact activities." It was written by Patrick Dunleavy, a professor political science and public policy at LSE; Amy Mollett, managing editor of the Impact of Social Sciences blog; and Danielle Moran, a journalist and a member of LSE's Public Policy Group. Among other things, the authors suggest that scholars tweet about each new publication, website update, or new blog on their cur- rent academic project and ask fol- lowers for feedback and comments. They also suggest that research- ers tweet about developments at related research sites—even though this might feel like promoting the competition. They write, "In most research areas the key problem is to get more attention for the area as a whole. Building up a Twitter net- work of reciprocating research proj- ects can…attract more attention (and funding) into the research area." The impact of a whole range of social media is explored in a 2012 presentation on "Openness and Impact in Academia Using Social Media" given at Edinburgh Uni- versity by Jane Tinkler, a research fellow at LSE's Public Policy Group. She notes, "When we began our impact research, we realized how much of this starts with visibility. For me, openness is about making research available to those who may want to engage with it as a way to prepare for impact." (For more on Open to All Making research freely available online. Access for Everyone Not only do electronic delivery formats make it easier for academics to share research with each other, such formats allow them to reach any other reader who might be interested. In the U.K., a new collaboration between publishers and libraries will allow certain journals to make their content available for free to students, independent researchers, and small business owners. The new initiative, Access to Research, will provide licensed online access to over 1.5 million journal articles and conference proceedings through library terminals. At the moment, the initiative includes 8,400 journals in the fields of biological sciences, social sciences, and engineering; also available will be articles from such fields as art, business, history, politics, film, and philosophy. Access to Research has been launched under the leadership of the Publish- ers Licensing Society in response to one of the main recommendations of the Finch Group, a committee convened by the U.K. government, to explore how access to publicly funded research could be expanded. The service rolled out in February as a two-year pilot. More information about the initiative can be found at www.AccesstoResearch.org.uk. 22 May/June 2014 BizEd