The effect of public deposit of scientific articles on readership.

A longitudinal cohort analysis of 3,499 articles published in 12 physiology journals reveals a 14% reduction in full text article downloads when they are made publicly available from the PubMed Central archive. The loss of article readership from the journal website may weaken the ability of the publisher to build communities of interest around the research article, impede the communication of news and events with society members and reduce the perceived value of the journal to institutional subscribers.