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Article Processing Charges, Altmetrics and Citation Impact: Is there an economic rationale?

Author

Listed:
  • Abdelghani Maddi

    (HCERES - Haut Conseil de l'Évaluation de la Recherche et de l'Enseignement Supérieur)

  • David / Sapinho

Abstract

The present study aims to analyze 1) the relationship between Citation Normalized Score of scientific publications and Article Processing Charges (APCs) of Gold Open Access (OA) publications 2) the determinants of APCs. To do so, we used APCs information provided by the OpenAPC database, citation scores of publications from the WoS database and, for Altmetrics, data from Altmetrics.com database, over the period from 2006 to 2019 for 83,752 articles published in 4751 journals belonging to 267 distinct publishers. Results show that contrary to common belief, paying high APCs does not necessarily increase the impact of publications. First, large publishers with high impact are not the most expensive. Second, publishers with the highest APCs are not necessarily the best in terms of impact. Correlation between APCs and impact is moderate. Regarding the determinants, results indicate that APCs are on average 50% higher in hybrid journals than in full OA journals. The results also suggest that Altmetrics do not have a great impact: OA articles that have garnered the most attention on internet are articles with relatively low APCs. Another interesting result is that the "number of readers" indicator is more effective as it is more correlated with classic bibliometrics indicators than the Altmetrics score.

Suggested Citation

  • Abdelghani Maddi & David / Sapinho, 2022. "Article Processing Charges, Altmetrics and Citation Impact: Is there an economic rationale?," Post-Print hal-03552377, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03552377
    DOI: 10.1007/s11192-022-04284-y
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-03552377v2
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. David J. Solomon & Bo‐Christer Björk, 2012. "A study of open access journals using article processing charges," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 63(8), pages 1485-1495, August.
    2. Abdelghani Maddi & Yves Gingras, 2021. "Gender Diversity In Research Teams And Citation Impact In Economics And Management," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(5), pages 1381-1404, December.
    3. Damien Besancenot & Radu Vranceanu, 2017. "A model of scholarly publishing with hybrid academic journals," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 82(1), pages 131-150, January.
    4. Nuria Bautista-Puig & Carmen Lopez-Illescas & Felix Moya-Anegon & Vicente Guerrero-Bote & Henk F. Moed, 2020. "Do journals flipping to gold open access show an OA citation or publication advantage?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 124(3), pages 2551-2575, September.
    5. Stephen Pinfield & Jennifer Salter & Peter A. Bath, 2016. "The “total cost of publication” in a hybrid open-access environment: Institutional approaches to funding journal article-processing charges in combination with subscriptions," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 67(7), pages 1751-1766, July.
    6. Pardeep Sud & Mike Thelwall, 2014. "Evaluating altmetrics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 98(2), pages 1131-1143, February.
    7. Abdelghani Maddi & Esther Lardreau & David Sapinho, 2021. "Open access in Europe: a national and regional comparison," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(4), pages 3131-3152, April.
    8. Bo-Christer Björk & David Solomon, 2015. "Article processing charges in OA journals: relationship between price and quality," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 103(2), pages 373-385, May.
    9. Yang, Siluo & Zheng, Mengxue & Yu, Yonghao & Wolfram, Dietmar, 2021. "Are Altmetric.com scores effective for research impact evaluation in the social sciences and humanities?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(1).
    10. Abdelghani Maddi, 2020. "Measuring open access publications: a novel normalized open access indicator," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 124(1), pages 379-398, July.
    11. David J. Solomon & Bo-Christer Björk, 2012. "A study of open access journals using article processing charges," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 63(8), pages 1485-1495, August.
    12. 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.
    13. Sergio Copiello, 2020. "Business as Usual with Article Processing Charges in the Transition towards OA Publishing: A Case Study Based on Elsevier," Publications, MDPI, vol. 8(1), pages 1-14, January.
    14. Michael Cary & Taylor Rockwell, 2020. "International Collaboration in Open Access Publications: How Income Shapes International Collaboration," Publications, MDPI, vol. 8(1), pages 1-24, February.
    15. 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.
    16. Abdelghani Maddi & David Sapinho, 2021. "Article Processing Charges based publications: to which extent the price explains scientific impact?," Papers 2107.07348, arXiv.org.
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    Keywords

    Article Processing Charges; Citation impact; Altmetrics; publisher; Open Access; bibliometric indicators;
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