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

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  • 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
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    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.
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    Cited by:

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    2. 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.
    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. 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.
    5. 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.
    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. 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).
    8. 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.
    9. 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.
    10. 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.
    11. 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.

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