Does open access increase scientific involvement?

If you spent your entire life on promoting "Open Access" for academic journals, you won't like this.

Contrary to the common belief, James Evans and Jacob Reimer reports that the effect of free access to the increase in citations from poor countries is more modest than you think, only 8%. Some of their conclusions like this one are even more troubling for open access lovers: "most researchers (even in the developing world - nt) rely on institutional subscriptions".

Maybe this quote from the study answers your questions that start with "why": "The influence of OA was more than twice as strong in the developing world but was less apparent in the very poorest countries where electronic access is limited".