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Measuring Altruistic Impact: A Model For Understanding The Social Justice Of Open Access, Margaret Heller, Franny Gaede

Scholarship and Professional Work

INTRODUCTION Traditional assessment of ways in which open access initiatives and institutional repositories have provided a return on investment normally use pragmatic measures such as download counts and citation benefits. This pragmatic approach misses out on the powerful altruistic impact of improving access to international and/or marginalized communities. Using a frame of social justice, this article considers the importance of developing altruistic measures of repositories, particularly for institutions with missions specifically related to social justice and related themes. METHODS Using web analytics data for search keywords from eight institutions and geographic usage data from nine institutions, the authors were able …