The impact of open access publishing (and other access initiatives) on use and users of digital scholarly journals

Oxford University Press moved one of its most prestigious journals, Nucleic Acids Research (NAR), to a full open access (OA), author-pays publishing model in January 2005. A deep log analysis study was carried out in order to determine the impact of this move to OA on the use and users of the journal. Surprisingly the findings showed that although there was a 143% increase in use from early 2003 to January 2005, it was search engines and robots that accounted for a high proportion of the increased use. Robots were responsible for half of sessions in the second quarter of 2005, compared to 1% in the second quarter of 2003.