Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research

Abstract

BackgroundArticles whose authors have supplemented subscription-based access to the publisher's version by self-archiving their own final draft to make it accessible free for all on the web (“Open Access”, OA) are cited significantly more than articles in the same journal and year that have not been made OA. Some have suggested that this “OA Advantage” may not be causal but just a self-selection bias, because authors preferentially make higher-quality articles OA. To test this we compared self-selective self-archiving with mandatory self-archiving for a sample of 27,197 articles published 2002–2006 in 1,984 journals.Methdology/Principal FindingsThe OA Advantage proved just as high for both. Logistic regression analysis showed that the advantage is independent of other correlates of citations (article age; journal impact factor; number of co-authors, references or pages; field; article type; or country) and highest for the most highly cited articles. The OA Advantage is real, independent and causal, but skewed. Its size is indeed correlated with quality, just as citations themselves are (the top 20% of articles receive about 80% of all citations).Conclusions/SignificanceThe OA advantage is greater for the more citable articles, not because of a quality bias from authors self-selecting what to make OA, but because of a quality advantage, from users self-selecting what to use and cite, freed by OA from the constraints of selective accessibility to subscribers only. It is hoped that these findings will help motivate the adoption of OA self-archiving mandates by universities, research institutions and research funders.

Open Access Publishing: A Study of Current Practice in Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery Research

“…Recent work in other medical fields has demonstrated that there appears to be limited knowledge of OA publishing amongst researchers in general [4]. Despite reservations about the OA model, several studies have supported the notion that the scientific impact and quality of evidence in OA research is not dissimilar from that of traditional subscription journals [5,6]. To date, there has been little investigation on the practice of OA publishing in oral and maxillofacial surgery (OMFS).…”

Open Access: A State of the Art

“…Open Access publications proved to have citation advantages (Gargouri et al 2010) resulting from open accessibility of scholarly results formerly only available in closed access. It guarantees faster communication and discussion of scientific results.…”

“…The statement ''In the online era, researchers' own 'mandate' will no longer just be 'publish-or-perish' but 'self-archive to flourish''' (Gargouri et al 2010) can be extended to ''researchers' own 'mandate' will no longer just be 'publish-or-perish' but give Open Access to flourish''.…”

The impact factor

“…They found that in medicine and health, OA journals founded in the last 10 years receive approximately as many citations as subscription journals launched during the same period. Gargouri [16] found little difference and concluded that the process of science is driven not by access, but by discovery.…”