“But my department chair wants big-name journals”: Gentle steps to open publishing

Hybrid open access refers to articles freely accessible via the Internet but which originate from an academic journal that provides most of its content via subscription. The effect of hybrid open access on citation counts and author behavior in the field of chemistry is something that has not been widely studied. We compared 814 open access articles and 27,621 subscription access articles published from 2006 through 2011 in American Chemical Society journals. As expected, the 2 comparison groups are not equal in all respects. Cumulative citation data were analyzed from years 2–5 following an article's publication date. A citation advantage for open access articles was correlated with the journal impact factor (IF) in low and medium IF journals, but not in high IF journals. Open access articles have a 24% higher mean citation rate than their subscription counterparts in low IF journals (confidence limits 8–42%, p = .0022) and similarly, a 26% higher mean citation rate in medium IF journals (confidence limits 14–40%, p < .001). Open access articles in high IF journals had no significant difference compared to subscription access articles (13% lower mean citation rate, confidence limits −27–3%, p = .10). These results are correlative, not causative, and may not be completely due to an open access effect. Authors of the open access articles were also surveyed to determine why they chose a hybrid open access option, paid the required article processing charge, and whether they believed it was money well spent. Authors primarily chose open access because of funding mandates; however, most considered the money well spent because open access increases information access to the scientific community and the general public, and potentially increases citations to their scholarship.

Traditionally, there have been two important media of academic publishing: scholarly journals and scholarly books. The first scholarly journal, the Journal des Sçavans, was founded by Denis de Sallo, appeared already in January 1665 in Paris, reappeared after the French Revolution as the Journal des Savants, and still exists as a leading journal in the humanities. Only a few weeks later, Henry Oldenbourg, the first secretary of the Royal Society of London, established a second scholarly journal, the Philosophical Transactions, with a focus on science. The purpose of these journals was to formalize the extensive correspondence between philosophers and scientists.1 In the 18th and the 19th century, more specialized journals gained in importance, most of which were published by learned societies. At the end of the 19th century, university presses too began to publish scholarly journals. Another traditional means of academic publishing are the various types of scholarly books, in particular monographs, edited volumes, reference works (specialist dictionaries, encyclopedias, and specialty reference manuals), and technical handbooks.2 A narrow definition of academic works would exclude textbooks and books for the broader public. Shavell (2010, 337–39) employs four criteria to determine whether a journal or book is academic in nature: (1) the authors and/or the publisher are usually academics; (2) the readers are mainly academics; (3) the content is academic in character; (4) only low royalties are paid, if any. As of today, scholarly journals are the preferred mode of academic publishing in particular in the sciences and some social sciences (e.g., economics), whereas scholarly books still play an important role in the arts, the humanities, and part of the social sciences. Whereas scholarly books are published by a large number of small national publishers in a multitude of languages, the most important scholarly journals are typically in English language and published by a few large commercial publishers. Until the mid-20th century, the most important journals were published by learned societies, before commercial publishers began to enter the academic publishing market in the 1960s and 1970s by launching new titles or acquiring existing ones. This development has led to a significant concentration of (commercial) publishers in the academic journal market.3 It is difficult to say for sure how many scholarly journals are available around the world. Some sources speak of more than 100,000, others of 87,000 or 73,000.4 In August 2018, Ulrich's Web Directory listed 33,119 active scholarly peer-reviewed English-language journals with about 3 million articles a year, complemented by an additional 9,372 journals in other languages. As an important subset, 11,655 journals with 2.2 million articles were included in the Clarivate Analytics' Journal Citation Reports (STM, 2018, 25–26). The Web of Science (WoS) database counted almost 12,500 journals in 2019 (see below, Section 2.2.1). With the mass expansion of academic education and the increasing size of faculty after World War II, publications in peer-reviewed, highly ranked journals have become an important precondition for academic careers in many disciplines, in particular in the sciences, economics, and partly in the other social sciences. In 1964, Eugene Garfield launched the Science Citation Index to calculate the impact factors of journals in science, medicine, and technology. This index was later followed by the Social Sciences Citation Index in 1973, the Arts & Humanities Citation Index in 1978 (Regazzi, 2015, 86–88), and the Emerging Sources Citation Index in 2015. These indices led to the development of the Journal Impact Factor (JIF), a metric that serves to rank a scholarly journal based on the number of citations to articles in that journal by articles in other indexed journals within a certain time period. During the same time, commercial publishers have increased their market shares to the detriment of non-for-profit publishers, such as learned societies and universities, becoming the dominant players in the market for scholarly journals. Today, the "big five" commercial academic publishers—Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and Sage—cover more than half of the market for scholarly journals. Since the 1980s, we have seen a sharp increase not just in the number of journals but in particular also in journal subscription prices, forcing many academic libraries to cancel serials subscriptions and to cut back on new monographs (the so-called serials crisis, cf. Eger & Scheufen, 2018, 23–29). These developments induced an increasing number of scholars, initially in the United States, to promote open access (OA) to scholarly articles as a replacement of or an addendum to the subscription model. After some individual initiatives in the late 1980s, the early 2000s saw the emergence of a global movement by scholars, librarians, and research sponsors, resulting in the "Budapest Open Access Initiative" (February 2002), the "Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing" (June 2003) and the "Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities" (October 2003).7 Two roads to OA can be distinguished8: First, gold OA refers to electronic journals with OA for all readers, often based on creative commons licenses. The publishers' costs are covered not by subscription fees but from other sources, such as article-processing charges (APCs)9 paid by authors, libraries, learned societies, or research sponsors, or subsidies from learned societies and other sources. Hybrid OA journals, whose numbers are rising fast, allow the authors to choose between paying an APC, thereby granting the reader OA, or not paying an APC and requiring the reader to pay for access to the article.10 A special branch of gold OA is mega-journals, the first one of which, PLOS One, was first published in 2006. In these journals, the peer review is restricted to examining only the soundness of the submitted articles but not their broader interest or impact. Also, mega-journals are not oriented towards a specific subject matter. The second road, green OA, refers to authors self-archiving pre-prints or post-prints of their papers on so-called OA repositories, potentially in addition to publication in traditional subscription-based journals. OpenDOAR listed 5,713 repositories in July 2021, of which 5,073 were classified as institutional repositories managed by universities, faculties, or other academic institutions, 364 as disciplinary (subject) repositories which aggregate research papers in specific disciplines (e.g., PubMed Central, arXiv, SSRN, and RepEc), 138 as aggregating repositories (including Academia and Scielo), and 139 as governmental repositories.11 Whereas institutional and disciplinary repositories generally respect the authors' or publishers' copyright, so-called Robin Hood or Pirate OA repositories do not. The most prominent example is Sci-Hub, founded in 2011 by Alexandra Elbakyan, a young scholar from Kazakhstan, which made over 60 million journal articles publicly available. Due to complaints by academic publishers, Sci-Hub had to switch domains several times.12 Recent years have seen the emergence of academic social networks such as Research Gate and Mendeley, as well as a stream of new forms of disseminating scientific content, including blogs, podcasts, and Facebook posts by prominent scholars. Regarding OA books, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) in June 2021 listed 43,036 academic peer-reviewed books from 621 publishers.13 The number of academic journals, as listed in the WoS database, has been growing steadily over the past two decades, from around 5,000 in 2000 to almost 12,500 in 2019 (Figure 1).14 Source: Author's calculations based on data from Web of Science (2021) The academic journal market is dominated by a few large commercial publishers, with the "big five" accounting for more than half of the academic journals listed by the WoS in 2019: Elsevier (1,754 journals), Springer (1,406), Wiley Blackwell (1,242), Taylor & Francis (1,199), and Sage (642).15 However, due to a downturn by Elsevier that began around 2006, this dominance has declined from around 60% in 2000 to around 51.7% in 2019 (Figure 2). Source: Author's calculations based on data from Web of Science (2021) Coupled with the advent of the internet and the concurrent increasing digitization of academic works, which through the bundling of different journals and/or formats ("big deals") facilitated second-degree price discrimination, this dominance has led to a drastic increase in subscription prices since the early 1990s (Bergstrom, 2013; Eger & Scheufen, 2018; Ramello, 2010). The resulting serials crisis—with academic libraries having to cut their journal portfolio—gave rise to a new publishing regime that offers OA to journal content. The share of pure (i.e., non-hybrid) OA journals as listed by the Directory of Open Access Journals (2021) has been increasing steadily, from around 3% of all WoS-listed journals in 2000 to more than 10% in 2019 (Figure 3). Source: Author's calculations based on data from Web of Science (2021) and DOAJ (2021) Interestingly, pure OA journals also gained ground in terms of quality. Figure 4 shows boxplots of the impact factors16 of closed access (CA) versus OA journals over time. While CA journals enjoyed an impact factor advantage over OA journals for a long time—all location scales of the impact factor for CA journals being above the ones for OA journals—OA journals are nowadays of the same quality, notwithstanding considerable differences between disciplines (see the contribution by Eger et al. to this issue). In 2019, impact factor distributions of both OA and CA journals are at the same level. Thus, advancing both in quantity and in quality, OA journals are becoming ever more relevant. The literature has identified the following advantages of an OA regime for academic works: (1) OA publications are likely read and therefore (2) cited more widely,17 which in turn (3) raises the incentives for academic authors to publish their research results as citations increase their reputation. These observations led to a broad discussion in academia as to whether the copyright regime may impede the evolution towards a universal OA regime, with very different conclusions being drawn regarding the impact of OA from a social welfare perspective (Scheufen, 2015; Shavell, 2010). Source: Author's calculations based on data from Web of Science (2021) and DOAJ (2021) The growing relevance of academic OA publishing warrants a closer look at the development of pure OA journals as the gold road towards OA. Figure 5 shows the number of newly launched OA journals from 2002 to 2020. Following relatively slow growth from 2002 to 2014, with fewer than 500 new OA journals per year (except 2013), the number has exceeded 1,000 in every year since, peaking in 2017, when more than 2,000 new OA journals were added to the DOAJ database. Today, the DOAJ database counts more than 16,000 OA journals in many different fields of research, published in 80 languages by publishers from 126 countries.18 Source: Author's calculations based on data from DOAJ (2021) Notwithstanding this impressive development, the relevance of OA journals varies substantially across academic disciplines (Figure 6).19 The research field with the largest attributed number of OA journals is Social Sciences (3,817), followed by Health Sciences (2,785), Technology and Engineering (1,416), and Language and Literature (1,153). By contrast, the natural science fields of Mathematics & Statistics (341), Physics & Astronomy (274), and Chemistry (181) feature only few OA journals.20 Source: Author's calculations based on data from DOAJ (2021) Remarkable differences also exist regarding a variety of OA journal characteristics (Table 1).21 Most (52%) OA journals leave the copyright of published works with the author, whereas the traditional CA regime demands that the exploitation rights are transferred to the publisher. Moreover, only around 28% of all OA journals charge APCs—a remarkable finding, as the OA regime implies the transition from a "reader pays" to an "author pays" model. Other fees (e.g., a submission fee to cover the review process) are charged by only around 2% of all OA journals. Nevertheless, author fees may constitute a significant obstacle for authors to publish in an OA venue, especially for non-tenured researchers seeking to publish in highly ranked journals, which are most likely to charge APCs (Budzinski et al., 2020). This obstacle also applies in particular to many researchers from developing countries, whose institutions rarely cover such costs. Yet 18% of OA journals provide for the possibility to waive such author fees. OA publishing may indeed be considered a form of development aid, for two reasons: First, few institutions in the developing world have so far been able to subscribe to academic journals. The OA regime can thus promote scientific participation and thereby foster the global evolution of science as a "trial and error" process. Free or cheaper access to literature for researchers in the developing world tends to increase both their output (number of publications) and input (number of references) (Mueller-Langer et al., 2020). Second, an OA regime grants access to the latest results in science for groups who were previously excluded because they are not "club" members of a university library. This includes, e.g., corporate researchers, physicians, or farmers. Notwithstanding all the changes discussed above, scholarly journals remain the most important medium of communication in many disciplines. For more than 300 years, they have been fulfilling the four key functions of registration (attribution), certification of articles (peer review), dissemination (distribution, access), and preservation (scholarly memory and permanent archiving). In recent decades, a fifth function must be added: the evaluation of researchers and their institutions.22 The increasing importance of OA articles in scholarly journals has triggered some controversial discussions, in particular regarding the questions as to whether OA negatively affects the quality of journal articles, whether OA improves the dissemination of research results, and how OA affects the competition between academic publishers as well as the distribution between academics and non-academics, between poor and rich universities, and between poor and rich countries. We shall discuss each of these questions and some related points in more detail below. In times when "alternative facts" tend to trump sound research results, academia must provide the public with reliable information. The users of this information should be sufficiently certain that the results are based on proper methods, reflect the state of science in the specific field, and were obtained independently, e.g., of any political or commercial interests.23 For that reason, strict and continuous quality control of research results is a "conditio sine qua non" for academic publishing. Facilitating the communication of content from authors to readers, the academic journal market may be characterized as a two-sided market (Rochet & Tirole, 2003). While readers look for the most important research results in their fields by top authors, the latter are interested in the journal's reputation, in wide readership, and in citations. Thus, journals with high impact factors hold the greatest attraction to both sides. With this in mind, the crucial question arises what effect, if any, OA is likely to have on the quality of academic articles. Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado in Denver, is very skeptical regarding the quality of OA articles, especially those that are financed by APCs: "By adding a financial component to the front end of the scholarly publishing process, the open-access movement will ultimately corrupt scholarly publishing and hurt the communication and sharing of novel knowledge" (Beall, 2013, 590). A weak form of "corruption" would to OA publishers' incentives to peer review and to more submitted papers in to increase from However, the commercial publishers' incentives to increase the number of articles to the detriment of the journal's quality at the the quality the APCs that the journal is able to as well as A form of "corruption" refers to the of some OA journal publishers have been to in particular young and who on publications for their or to allow authors to publish articles in OA journals, by articles with or peer academics on their the or of journals, and so In established a of publishers, which was in January in to not only from the publishers but also from OA who that the to to OA. this quality to be a one which exists only in some disciplines (e.g., economics), whereas in other disciplines, such as some OA journals are the ranked journals and there is of a quality researchers their and if academic institutions and research to the APCs for articles by journals, this is to A by is that OA may new and will new and of their will remain (Beall, 2013, 590). However, this is a of the process, of whether the was submitted to a traditional or an OA and many prominent which that articles are generally more likely to the review than and creative but ones. In their contribution to this special & in a two-sided that OA can be a feature of journals. The have seen an increasing both of data on any subject and of that serves to that data almost there has been a of articles in every For such articles, the peer for quality A can be made between pure the same data and the same are as in the and scientific which (1) different data but the same (2) the same data but new methods, or (3) new data and new A to a on (1) the of an or in previously published (2) the impact of the (3) the of and (4) the of to publish Whereas some years when data were on the of mainly of technical copyright and data are the of Regarding the first journals in have already been including an OA journal by University with a focus on Technology and and the Journal for in by Springer the years or a number of in several disciplines have that the results of many when published in highly ranked journals, not be many academics to speak of a The is to the quality of research by access to data so as to be able to results of and or the incentives to the in the first Another important question is whether digitization and the internet have facilitated the quality of of their scholarly and and of their the quality of academic researchers and of is based on which were to provide a metric for journals with each 2019, being a of the citations to all articles in a journal but not of the citations to the individual articles. 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The is to competition to journal publishers to articles of quality at and and to the interested public. The of competition not on the and of OA publishing. there were only pure OA journals, publishers would for all authors had to cover the APCs from their the APCs would tend towards a that the publishers to However, in the publishers of pure OA journals, OA journals and CA journals with OA repositories, and APCs may be by or research these different to foster OA will have specific on the of are some (1) green OA is or an to as has been the in since January 2014, publishers of subscription journals difficult to increase their fees. 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Representation of Women As Leaders of Hemato-Oncology Clinical Trials

Publish and perish

The Impact of Ophthalmology

Courtesy authorship is defined as including an individual who has not met authorship criteria as an author. Although most journals follow strict authorship criteria, the current incidence of courtesy authorship is unknown. To assess the practices related to courtesy authorship in surgical journals and academia. A survey was conducted from July 15 to October 27, 2017, of the first authors and senior authors of original articles, reviews, and clinical trials published between 2014 and 2015 in 8 surgical journals categorized as having a high or low impact factor. The prevalence of courtesy authorship overall and among subgroups of authors in high impact factor journals and low impact factor journals and among first authors and senior authors, as well as author opinions regarding courtesy authorship. A total of 203 first authors and 254 senior authors responded (of 369 respondents who provided data on sex, 271 were men and 98 were women), with most being in academic programs (first authors, 116 of 168 [69.0%]; senior authors, 173 of 202 [85.6%]). A total of 17.2% of respondents (42 of 244) reported adding courtesy authors for the surveyed publications: 20.4% by first authors (32 of 157) and 11.5% by senior authors (10 of 87), but 53.7% (131 of 244) reported adding courtesy authorship on prior publications and 33.2% (81 of 244) had been added as a courtesy author in the past. Although 45 of 85 senior authors (52.9%) thought that courtesy authorship has decreased, 93 of 144 first authors (64.6%) thought that courtesy authorship has not changed or had increased (P = .03). There was no difference in the incidence of courtesy authorship for low vs high impact factor journals. Both first authors (29 of 149 [19.5%]) and senior authors (19 of 85 [22.4%]) reported pressures to add courtesy authorship, but external pressure was greater for low impact factor journals than for high impact factor journals (77 of 166 [46.4%] vs 60 of 167 [35.9%]; P = .04). More authors in low impact factor journals than in high impact factor journals thought that courtesy authorship was less harmful to academia (55 of 114 [48.2%] vs 34 of 117 [29.1%]). Overall, senior authors reported more positive outcomes with courtesy authorship (eg, improved morale and avoided author conflicts) than did first authors. Courtesy authorship use is common by both first and senior authors in low impact factor journals and high impact factor journals. There are different perceptions, practices, and pressures to include courtesy authorship for first and senior authors. Understanding these issues will lead to better education to eliminate this practice.

Is journal impact factor a good measure of research merit? This question has assumed a great importance after the notification of the University Grants Commission (Minimum Qualifications for Appointment of Teachers and other Academic Staff in Universities and Colleges and Measures for the Maintenance of Standards in Higher Education) Regulations, 2009 on September 23rd 2009. Now publication of research papers/articles in reputed journals has become an important factor in assessment of the academic performance of teachers in colleges and universities in India. One of the measures of reputation and academic standard (rank or importance) of a journal is the so-called ‘Impact Factor.’ This study makes a detailed statistical analysis of Journal Impact Factors across the disciplines. It finds that if journal impact factor is used to assess the academic performance of individuals (for the purpose of selection, promotion, etc) and it is not borne in mind that due to vast differences in the nature of distribution of impact factors across the disciplines they are not justifiably comparable, a below average scholar in the one discipline will rank higher and will be honored (and benefitted) more than another scholar in some other discipline (wherein the journal impact factor is adversely skewed). It may be noted that in the university departments there are specializations with low impact factor journals and other specializations with very high impact factor journals. But the teachers/researchers of different specializations in the departments compete with each other for promotion. In this milieu, the researchers with an unfortunate specialization (wherein the journal impact factor is mingy or adversely skewed) would receive injustice is plainly predetermined. Therefore, a measure such as the hindex which quantifies the quality as well as productivity of an individual author/scholar would be more appropriate than the journal impact factor. The h-index may be fine-tuned and hence the g-index or Tol’s index may be used. Nevertheless, even the h-index and the Tol’s index would not be appropriate to the purpose of interdisciplinary or inter-specialization comparisons. A more informed and balanced judgment of the expert committee for selection, appointment and promotion purposes will continue to be extremely important.

Background Citations of papers are positively influenced by the journal's impact factor (IF). For non-open access (non-OA) journals, this influence may be due to the fact that high-IF journals are more often purchased by libraries, and are therefore more often available to researchers, than low-IF journals. This positive influence has not, however, been shown specifically for papers published in open access (OA) journals, which are universally accessible, and do not need library purchase. It is therefore important to ascertain if the IF influences citations in OA journals too. Methods 203 randomized controlled trials (102 OA and 101 non-OA) published in January 2011 were included in the study. Five-year citations for papers published in OA journals were compared to those for non-OA journals. Source papers were derived from PubMed. Citations were retrieved from Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar databases. The Thompson-Reuter's IF was used. Results OA journals were found to have significantly more citations overall compared to non-OA journals (median 15.5 vs 12, p=0.039). The IF did not correlate with citations for OA journals (Spearman's rho =0.187, p=0.60). The increase in the citations with increasing IF was minimal for OA journals (beta coefficient = 3.346, 95% CI -0.464, 7.156, p=0.084). In contrast, the IF did show moderate correlation with citations for articles published in non-OA journals (Spearman's rho=0.514, p<0.001). The increase in the number of citations was also significant (beta coefficient = 4.347, 95% CI 2.42, 6.274, p<0.001). Conclusion It is better to publish in an OA journal for more citations. It may not be worth paying high publishing fees for higher IF journals, because there is minimal gain in terms of increased number of citations. On the other hand, if one wishes to publish in a non-OA journal, it is better to choose one with a high IF.

Background Citations of papers are positively influenced by the journal’s impact factor (IF). For non-open access (non-OA) journals, this influence may be due to the fact that high-IF journals are more often purchased by libraries, and are therefore more often available to researchers, than low-IF journals. This positive influence has not, however, been shown specifically for papers published in open access (OA) journals, which are universally accessible, and do not need library purchase. It is therefore important to ascertain if the IF influences citations in OA journals too. Methods 203 randomized controlled trials (102 OA and 101 non-OA) published in January 2011 were included in the study. Five-year citations for papers published in OA journals were compared to those for non-OA journals. Source papers were derived from PubMed. Citations were retrieved from Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar databases. The Thompson-Reuter’s IF was used. Results OA journals were found to have significantly more citations overall compared to non-OA journals (median 15.5 vs 12, p=0.039). The IF did not correlate with citations for OA journals (Spearman’s rho =0.187, p=0.60). The increase in the citations with increasing IF was minimal for OA journals (beta coefficient = 3.346, 95% CI -0.464, 7.156, p=0.084). In contrast, the IF did show moderate correlation with citations for articles published in non-OA journals (Spearman’s rho=0.514, p<0.001). The increase in the number of citations was also significant (beta coefficient = 4.347, 95% CI 2.42, 6.274, p<0.001). Conclusion It is better to publish in an OA journal for more citations. It may not be worth paying high publishing fees for higher IF journals, because there is minimal gain in terms of increased number of citations. On the other hand, if one wishes to publish in a non-OA journal, it is better to choose one with a high IF.

Impact, Not Just Impact Factor: Responding to the Manila Declaration on the Availability and Use of Health Research Information

Appraising the Quality of Reporting of American College of Surgeons NSQIP Emergency General Surgery Studies

In this communication, we look at Open Access (OA) publishing practices in geochemistry. We examine a list of 56 journals and assess whether Article Processing Charges (APCs) and Journal Impact Factors (JIFs) appear to influence publication or not. More than 40% of articles in 2018–2019 were published OA, and about 70% of that portion in fully OA journals. These had a mean APC of US$ 900, whereas the remaining were published in hybrid journals with a higher mean APC of more than $US 1,800. A moderate and positive correlation is found between the number of OA articles published in hybrids journals and their JIF, whereas there is a stronger positive relationship between the number of OA articles published in fully OA journals and the APC. For OA articles published in hybrid journals, it seems that the proportion of OA articles tends to increase in journals with higher JIF.

We, as many other journal editors, have been looking at the recent release of the 2014 Journal Citation Reports by Thompson-Reuters. The results for the Memorias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz have again been gratifying; our two-year impact factor has increased to 1.592 while the Memorias is one of the few Latin American journals with a five-year impact factor above 2.0. The other indices released by Thomson-Reuters have provided even more impressive news for the Memorias. The journal continues not only to be the most highly cited scientific periodical (with 5,899 citations in 2014), but also has the highest Eigenfactor score (0.086) of any Latin American journal. The Eigenfactor is like the impact factor, but gives more weight to citations from highly cited journals and less weight to citations from less cited journals, and self-citations are also omitted from the calculation. However when we compare the Memorias to international journals worldwide the results are not so impressive. Here we have the same struggle as many other journals published in developing countries. That is, how can we attract the best manuscripts from our region, which tend to be sent by their authors to highly cited international journals? Even so the Memorias, in the tropical medicine category is classified within the top ten journals, using ranking by any of the indices mentioned above, while among parasitology journals the Memorias is ranked in the third quartile by impact factor. Tropical medicine and parasitology are the only two categories were Thomson-Reuters classifies the Memorias. Other data from the Journal Citation Reports show the changes in journal publishing. One is the growth of megajournals. There are now over 100 journals that publish 1,000 articles per year. PLoS One, that published more than 30,000 articles last year, heads the list. While many are traditional journals, such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the Journal of Biological Chemistry, there are several newer open access (OA) journals as for instance the Scientific Reports from the Nature Publishing Group, which published nearly 4,000 articles with an impact factor of over 5.0. Another trend has been the rise of OA journals. In several categories, such as public health, tropical medicine and parasitology, the ranking of journals by impact factor is headed by OA journals. New OA journals such as eLife, which is sponsored by major research funders, have received their first impact factors (an impressive score of nearly 10) and flagship journals published by the major OA publishers have seen increases in their impact. Brazil is fortunate to have most of its scientific journals published as OA. This is principally due to the SciELO project, which provides an OA platform for selected Brazilian journals, including the Memorias. Many of the Brazilian journals, including the Memorias, are published under a special model of OA where no fees are charged to authors and readers sometimes referred to as Platinum Open Acess. These journals are funded by a variety of public resources (including institutional and research agency funding). This together with the pro bonowork of their editors and reviewers allows for a form of open public access: authors can contribute to the scientific literature and any member of the public can access this literature without any financial barriers. The scientific publication process is thus funded by the Brazilian taxpayers as a logical complement to their investment in scientific research. With this distinctive form of OA together with improvements in the quality of its contents and better dissemination of the journal we hope that the Memorias will continue to increase its impact in the coming years.

Several studies have argued that open access (OA) journals have higher citation rate than non-OA journals (subscription-based journals). However, there are still controversial discussions regarding the OA citation advantage. Considering the difference between the diffusion factor and the journal impact factor (JIF) in measuring scientific impact and its potential for a new insight in understanding the multidimensionality of impact, this study aims to examine and compare the journal diffusion indicator values of OA and non-OA journals to test whether or not OA journals would have wider impact than non-OA journals. The data used in this study were obtained from the three-year Web of Science data (2015, 2014, and 2013) in the areas of general internal medicine. The results reveal that unlike this study’s propositions, the OA journals do not have diffusion advantage than the non-OA journals. This result contradicts several prior citation advantage studies which focus on the citation benefits of OA journals. This study contributes to the controversial OA citation advantage discussions in the prior studies. Key words: Open access, citation advantage, journal diffusion factor, journal impact, citation benefit.

Background: The internet has changed the way we access and publish Orthopaedic literature. Traditional subscription journals have been challenged by the open access method of publication which permits the author to make their article available to all readers for free, often at a cost to the author. This has also been adopted in part by traditional subscription journals forming hybrid journals. One of the criticisms of open access publications is that it provides the author with a “pay to publish” opportunity. We aimed to determine if access to the journals impacts their influence. Methods: We selected the top 40 Trauma and Orthopaedic Journals as ranked by the SCImago Rank. Each journal was reviewed and assessed for the journal quality, defined by reviewing the journal impact factor and SCImago rank; influence, defined by reviewing the top 10 articles provided by the journal for the number of citations; and cost of open access publication. Results: Of the top 40 journals, 10 were subscription, 10 were open access, and 20 were hybrid journals. Subscription journals had the highest mean impact factor, and SCImago rank with a significant difference in the impact factor (p = 0.001) and SCImago rank (p = 0.021) observed between subscription and open access journals. No significant difference was seen between citation numbers of articles published in subscription and open access journals (p = 0.168). There was a positive correlation between the cost of publishing in an open access journal and the impact factor (r = 0.404) but a negative correlation between cost and the number of citations (r = 0.319). Conclusion: Open access journals have significantly lower quality measures in comparison to subscription journals. Despite this, we found no difference between the number of citations, suggestive of there being no difference in the influence of these journals in spite of the observed difference in quality.