van Bellen, Simon; Larivière, Vincent
Despite their usefulness in analyzing the uses of research papers within and beyond academia, the availability of download data remains scarce. Using data from the Érudit journal platform, this paper analyzes the effect of open access availability on numbers of downloads and their geographic diversity. Results show that OA positively affects the numbers of downloads by a factor of 3.0 during the embargo period, and that downloads may maintain this advantage during the following years. Eighty percent of downloads originated from non-subscribing visitors, with the end of the embargo period being strongly associated with an expansion of their geographic diversity. On the whole, our results show that journals can substantially broaden international readership by adopting immediate OA, and that metadata quality is at least as influential as OA for downloads.