The Benefits of Sharing—Nice Guys and Girls do Finish First - Open-Source Lab: How to Build Your Own Hardware and Reduce Research Costs - page 17

FIGURE 2.1 Open-source polymer laser welding system for microchannel heat exchanger
fabrication.
Finally, it should be noted that by making not only our experimental designs open but also
our experimental apparatuses, we have made it extremely easy for other groups to replicate
and build on our work. Other groups can quickly build copies of our experimental apparat-
uses and begin collaborating to push our research work forward. This sharing again directly
increases the impact our work has in various science and engineering subcommunities that we
work within and can assist in increasing citations, a topic we will cover in detail in the next
section.
2.1.3 Increased visibility, citations and public relations
The open wiki that my group uses is Appropedia, which is currently the largest wiki dedicated
to appropriate technology and sustainability, thus giving us widespread readership and ac-
cessibility. Using a page-view counting tool , 8 it is easy to see that our groups' work had been
accessed over 1 million times and that it is accessed hundreds of thousands of times each year.
This is an incredible visibility for academic work. This visibility of our various innovations
and studies often atract media atention, which increases positive public relations for my uni-
versity. Depending on your particular university, this may or may not be that important in
tenure and promotion. However, no mater what university you are associated with, your cita-
tions will mater. An open-source research approach can directly improve your citations as
discussed below.
When we have completed a project or paper, we place summaries of work on Appropedia,
which often include some of the most useful data along with DOI links to the original article
and ideally to an open-access version when tolerated from the publisher-author's agreement. 9
This practice unquestionably increases the number of people reading a given article. This not
only helps our work have greater impact and accessibility in the greater world, it also direc-
tly helps us in the academic sphere. It has been postulated that if more people read it, then
open access will also raise the citation rate and h -index 10 [ 11 ] . In some fields, like astrophysics,
the number of citations for an article roughly doubles if the articles are open access [ 12 , 13 ] .
Although such claims are under debate in the literature, our group's experience using “open
access +”, particularly with citations from non-North American researchers, 11 provides some