One of the great benefits of online publishing is but a side-effect of the overall project: the constant creation of a pool of data that contain information about how research is accessed, used, discussed, and cited. 

The Atlantic sourced this from What Users do with PLoS Research Papers, see http://blogs.plos.org/mfenner/2012/07/24/what-users-do-with-plos-one-papers/ for the original post by Martin Fenner.

* PLoS is an abbreviation for "Public Library of Science".