Open access increases citations of papers in ecology

Abstract

Abstract. Open access (OA) can effectively increase the accessibility and visibility of scientific articles and thus potentially confer them with citation advantages. Such an impact may be more pronounced in developing countries where the cost for journal subscription is comparably expensive and usually unaffordable. By comparing one OA article with one non-OA article published in the same issue, we tested the impact of OA on citation advantages of articles published in 46 ecology journals indexed in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). We compared OA to non-OA articles published in the same issue of these journals, thereby controlling for potentially confounding effects of publication requirement and period. OA articles received significantly more citations than non-OA articles, and this citation advantage of approximately one citation per year was sustained across publication years from 2009 to 2013. The OA citation advantage did not depend upon income of the country of origin of the citing scientists, and the OA citation advantage was found for citing scientists from North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceania, but not for Latin America. A total of 10 countries contributed more than 1000 citations each, and the OA citation advantage was found in all the 10 countries except Canada. Therefore, in ecology journals OA confers articles with citation advantages and such an impact accumulates with years and independent of the economic status of the countries. This information may guide decisions of scientific societies, journals, and individual authors as they weigh the relative costs and benefits of open electronic accessibility of scientific research.

Open access in ethics research: an analysis of open access availability and author self-archiving behaviour in light of journal copyright restrictions

“…The complexity of the debate around open access also stems from the presence of clashing stakeholder interests, where the vision for the path forward is not uniform and key actors have their own considerations and arguments for how the future of scholarly publishing should be shaped. The case for open access is sometimes based on pragmatic grounds and pointing to the increased citations that research outputs being made freely available through the web have been found to receive (Tang et al 2017;Sotudeh et al 2015;Fukuzawa 2017), though some have also argued that the positive effect on citations does not occur in all fields (Wray 2016). However, there is also an evident ethical dimension in this debate (Piccininni 1997;van Krevelen 2005;Troll Covey 2009a).…”

Perceived quality and self‐identity in scholarly publishing

“…Studies on OA impact and quality indicate that whether an article is published OA or not is not a reliable indicator of its quality, nor is the journal in which it is published (Bjork & Solomon, 2012;Harnad & Brody, 2004;Tang, Bever, & Yu, 2017). Studies on OA impact and quality indicate that whether an article is published OA or not is not a reliable indicator of its quality, nor is the journal in which it is published (Bjork & Solomon, 2012;Harnad & Brody, 2004;Tang, Bever, & Yu, 2017).…”

Envisioning the scientific paper of the future

“…Responsible use of research funds requires that research findings remain accessible. Open access papers are discoverable and accessible to everyone; some evidence suggests that open access research has a higher readership (Tang et al 2017). It is too early to know if there will eventually be a tipping point whereby all papers move towards open access (beyond university repositories; see Bankier and Perciali (2008) 2018and Lehtomäki et al (2018)) and the funder or university would cover publication fees.…”