IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0159614.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Post-Embargo Open Access Citation Advantage: It Exists (Probably), It’s Modest (Usually), and the Rich Get Richer (of Course)

Author

Listed:
  • Jim Ottaviani

Abstract

Many studies show that open access (OA) articles—articles from scholarly journals made freely available to readers without requiring subscription fees—are downloaded, and presumably read, more often than closed access/subscription-only articles. Assertions that OA articles are also cited more often generate more controversy. Confounding factors (authors may self-select only the best articles to make OA; absence of an appropriate control group of non-OA articles with which to compare citation figures; conflation of pre-publication vs. published/publisher versions of articles, etc.) make demonstrating a real citation difference difficult. This study addresses those factors and shows that an open access citation advantage as high as 19% exists, even when articles are embargoed during some or all of their prime citation years. Not surprisingly, better (defined as above median) articles gain more when made OA.

Suggested Citation

  • Jim Ottaviani, 2016. "The Post-Embargo Open Access Citation Advantage: It Exists (Probably), It’s Modest (Usually), and the Rich Get Richer (of Course)," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(8), pages 1-11, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0159614
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0159614
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0159614
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0159614&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0159614?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Yassine Gargouri & Chawki Hajjem & Vincent Larivière & Yves Gingras & Les Carr & Tim Brody & Stevan Harnad, 2010. "Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 5(10), pages 1-12, October.
    2. Gaulé, Patrick & Maystre, Nicolas, 2011. "Getting cited: Does open access help?," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 40(10), pages 1332-1338.
      • Patrick Gaulé & Nicolas Maystre, 2008. "Getting cited: does open access help?," CEMI Working Papers cemi-workingpaper-2008-00, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Collège du Management de la Technologie, Management of Technology and Entrepreneurship Institute, Chaire en Economie et Management de l'Innovation.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Chompunuch Saravudecha & Duangruthai Na Thungfai & Chananthida Phasom & Sodsri Gunta-in & Aorrakanya Metha & Peangkobfah Punyaphet & Tippawan Sookruay & Wannachai Sakuludomkan & Nut Koonrungsesomboon, 2023. "Hybrid Gold Open Access Citation Advantage in Clinical Medicine: Analysis of Hybrid Journals in the Web of Science," Publications, MDPI, vol. 11(2), pages 1-9, March.
    2. Jonathan Wheeler & Ngoc-Minh Pham & Kenning Arlitsch & Justin D. Shanks, 2022. "Impact factions: assessing the citation impact of different types of open access repositories," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(8), pages 4977-5003, August.
    3. Li, Huixu & Liu, Lanjian & Wang, Xianwen, 2021. "The open access effect in social media exposure of scholarly articles: A matched-pair analysis," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(3).
    4. Sergio Copiello, 2020. "The alleged citation advantage of video abstracts may be a matter of self-citations and self-selection bias. Comment on “The impact of video abstract on citation counts” by Zong et al," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 122(1), pages 751-757, January.
    5. Paul Kudlow & Devin Bissky Dziadyk & Alan Rutledge & Aviv Shachak & Gunther Eysenbach, 2020. "The citation advantage of promoted articles in a cross‐publisher distribution platform: A 12‐month randomized controlled trial," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 71(10), pages 1257-1274, October.
    6. Michael Taylor, 2020. "An altmetric attention advantage for open access books in the humanities and social sciences," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(3), pages 2523-2543, December.
    7. Thomas Eger & Armin Mertens & Marc Scheufen, 2021. "Publication cultures and the citation impact of open access," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 42(8), pages 1980-1998, December.
    8. Sergio Copiello, 2019. "The open access citation premium may depend on the openness and inclusiveness of the indexing database, but the relationship is controversial because it is ambiguous where the open access boundary lie," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 121(2), pages 995-1018, November.
    9. Fakhri Momeni & Philipp Mayr & Nicholas Fraser & Isabella Peters, 2021. "What happens when a journal converts to open access? A bibliometric analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(12), pages 9811-9827, December.
    10. Hajar Sotudeh & Zohreh Estakhr, 2018. "Sustainability of open access citation advantage: the case of Elsevier’s author-pays hybrid open access journals," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 115(1), pages 563-576, April.
    11. A Townsend Peterson & Paul E Johnson & Narayani Barve & Ada Emmett & Marc L Greenberg & Josh Bolick & Huijie Qiao, 2019. "The NIH public access policy did not harm biomedical journals," PLOS Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 17(10), pages 1-7, October.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Alexander Cuntz & Frank Mueller-Langer & Alessio Muscarnera & Prince C. Oguguo & Marc Scheufen, 2024. "Access to science and innovation in the developing world," WIPO Economic Research Working Papers 78, World Intellectual Property Organization - Economics and Statistics Division.
    2. Mark J. McCabe & Christopher M. Snyder, 2018. "Open Access as a Crude Solution to a Hold‐Up Problem in the Two‐Sided Market for Academic Journals," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 66(2), pages 301-349, June.
    3. Sergio Copiello, 2019. "The open access citation premium may depend on the openness and inclusiveness of the indexing database, but the relationship is controversial because it is ambiguous where the open access boundary lie," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 121(2), pages 995-1018, November.
    4. Hou, Li & Wu, Qiang & Xie, Yundong, 2024. "Does open identity of peer reviewers positively relate to citations?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 18(1).
    5. Pablo Dorta-González & Sara M. González-Betancor & María Isabel Dorta-González, 2017. "Reconsidering the gold open access citation advantage postulate in a multidisciplinary context: an analysis of the subject categories in the Web of Science database 2009–2014," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 112(2), pages 877-901, August.
    6. Hajar Sotudeh & Zohreh Estakhr, 2018. "Sustainability of open access citation advantage: the case of Elsevier’s author-pays hybrid open access journals," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 115(1), pages 563-576, April.
    7. Brady D. Lund & Sanjay Kumar Maurya, 2020. "The relationship between highly-cited papers and the frequency of citations to other papers within-issue among three top information science journals," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(3), pages 2491-2504, December.
    8. Thomas Eger & Armin Mertens & Marc Scheufen, 2021. "Publication cultures and the citation impact of open access," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 42(8), pages 1980-1998, December.
    9. Liwei Zhang & Liang Ma, 2024. "Different open access routes, varying societal impacts: evidence from the Royal Society biological journals," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 129(6), pages 3407-3431, June.
    10. Milan Frederik Klus & Alexander Dilger, 2020. "Success factors of academic journals in the digital age," Business Research, Springer;German Academic Association for Business Research, vol. 13(3), pages 1115-1143, November.
    11. Sara M. González-Betancor & Pablo Dorta-González, 2019. "Publication modalities ‘article in press’ and ‘open access’ in relation to journal average citation," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 120(3), pages 1209-1223, September.
    12. Núria Bautista-Puig & Daniela De Filippo & Elba Mauleón & Elías Sanz-Casado, 2019. "Scientific Landscape of Citizen Science Publications: Dynamics, Content and Presence in Social Media," Publications, MDPI, vol. 7(1), pages 1-22, February.
    13. Ajiferuke, Isola & Famoye, Felix, 2015. "Modelling count response variables in informetric studies: Comparison among count, linear, and lognormal regression models," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 9(3), pages 499-513.
    14. Barbara McGillivray & Mathias Astell, 2019. "The relationship between usage and citations in an open access mega-journal," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 121(2), pages 817-838, November.
    15. Mueller-Langer, Frank & Scheufen, Marc & Waelbroeck, Patrick, 2020. "Does online access promote research in developing countries? Empirical evidence from article-level data," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 49(2).
    16. Hajar Sotudeh & Zahra Ghasempour & Maryam Yaghtin, 2015. "The citation advantage of author-pays model: the case of Springer and Elsevier OA journals," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 104(2), pages 581-608, August.
    17. Frank Mueller‐Langer & Richard Watt, 2021. "Optimal pricing and quality of academic journals and the ambiguous welfare effects of forced open access: A two‐sided model," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 42(8), pages 1945-1959, December.
    18. Vanclay, Jerome K., 2013. "Factors affecting citation rates in environmental science," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 7(2), pages 265-271.
    19. Juliana Loureiro Almeida Campos & André Sobral & Josivan Soares Silva & Thiago Antonio Sousa Araújo & Washington Soares Ferreira-Júnior & Flávia Rosa Santoro & Gilney Charll Santos & Ulysses Paulino A, 2016. "Insularity and citation behavior of scientific articles in young fields: the case of ethnobiology," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 109(2), pages 1037-1055, November.
    20. Wang, Zhiqi & Chen, Yue & Glänzel, Wolfgang, 2020. "Preprints as accelerator of scholarly communication: An empirical analysis in Mathematics," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(4).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0159614. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.