BitViews changes incentives

BitViews as a nudge that changes researchers' incentives

As explained more fully in the forthcoming Insights article, the fundamental obstacle blocking open access (OA) is the bundling together of the author's approved manuscript (AM) and the published article. As long as the two are bundled together, the AM has very little independent value compared to the published article.
Why? Because the main currency of academic recognition and esteem is given by the citation, an object attached to articles, not AMs. But AMs can be given independent value by exploiting their inherent advantage compared to articles - they are freely available if authors make them available, depositing them in OA repositories.
Currently, researchers have very little incentive to deposit their AMs and make them freely accessible for the simple reason that there is no reliable, unbiased, and worldwide mechanism for recording their online usage and therefore authors (and indeed anybody else) cannot assess the non-citation impact of their research. But this is precisely what BitViews provides!
Bitviews produces a free, public ledger of online usage data for AMs on a worldwide scale, providing researchers, funding bodies, policy-makers, promotion committees, etc. with the raw data to assess the non-citation impact of research. This completes BitViews' virtuous circle: as more AMs are deposited as open access, the more accurate and valuable online usage data become, encouraging more AMs to be deposited.