Abstract
This study is one of the first that uses the recently introduced open access (OA) labels in the Web of Science (WoS) metadata to investigate whether OA articles published in Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed journals experience a citation advantage in comparison to subscription journal articles, specifically those of which no self-archived versions are available. Bibliometric data on all articles and reviews indexed in WoS, and published from 2013 to 2015, were analysed. In addition to normalised citation score (NCS), we used two additional measures of citation advantage: whether an article was cited at all; and whether an article is among the most frequently cited percentile of articles within its respective subject area (pptopX %). For each WoS subject area, the strength of the relationship between access status (whether an article was published in an OA journal) and each of these three measures was calculated. We found that OA journal articles experience a citation advantage in very few subject areas and, in most of these subject areas, the citation advantage was found on only a single measure of citation advantage, namely whether the article was cited at all. Our results lead us to conclude that access status accounts for little of the variability in the number of citations an article accumulates. The methodology and the calculations that were used in this study are described in detail and we believe that the lessons we learnt, and the recommendations we make, will be of much use to future researchers interested in using the WoS OA labels, and to the field of citation advantage in general.
Highlights
The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) declaration (Chan et al 2002) contains one of the first and most definitive definitions of open access (OA) to peer-reviewed journal publications, and it lay the foundation of the OA movement (Miguel et al 2016, p. 7)
Thereafter we describe the prevalence of OA journal articles, in general and by subject area
From these we can conclude that in 2009 approximately 5% of all journal articles were published in OA journals and by 2014 this had increased to 10% (Torres-Salinas et al 2016, p. 19, Dorta-González et al 2017, p. 880)
Summary
The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) declaration (Chan et al 2002) contains one of the first and most definitive definitions of open access (OA) to peer-reviewed journal publications, and it lay the foundation of the OA movement (Miguel et al 2016, p. 7). With an increase in prevalence of OA peer-reviewed journal publications since the declaration, and a new method to identify OA journal articles, it is possible to investigate, on a sufficiently large scale, whether the proclaimed benefits have been realised. We investigate the veracity of the claim of the BOAI declaration that OA provides a “vast and measurable” increase in “impact” and “visibility” of peerreviewed journal publications, as measured through citations In order to control for potential differences in citation behaviour across OA types, we limited our results analysis to only one type of OA, excluding other types of OA, e.g. OA self-archived articles and hybrid OA articles
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