Abstract
INTRODUCTION Open access (OA) citation effect studies have looked at a number of disciplines but not yet the field of communication studies. This study researched how communication studies fare with the open access citation effect, as well as whether researchers follow their journal deposit policies. METHOD The study tracked 920 articles published in 2011 and 2012 from 10 journals and then searched for citations and an OA version using the program Publish or Perish. Deposit policies of each of the journals were gathered from SHERPA/RoMEO and used to evaluate OA versions. RESULTS From the sample, 42 percent had OA versions available. Of those OA articles, 363 appeared to violate publisher deposit policies by depositing the version of record, but the study failed to identify post-print versions for 87 percent of the total sample for the journals that allowed it. All articles with an OA version had a median of 17 citations, compared to only nine citations for non-OA articles. DISCUSSION & CONCLUSION The citation averages, which are statistically significant, show a positive correlation between OA and the number of citations. The study also shows communication studies researchers are taking part in open access but perhaps without the full understanding of their publisher’s policies.
Highlights
Open access (OA) citation effect studies have looked at a number of disciplines but not yet the field of communication studies
Open access advocates find this measure valuable as it may show the greater impact that open access (OA) articles have over other scholarly articles that remain behind a toll-access (TA) gateway
The initial focus on access and citation in the literature was on the natural sciences, where OA has seen much buy-in, but more recent findings show that differences in the citation rate might depend on the discipline or field of an article (Antelman, 2004; Hajjem, Harnad, & Gingras, 2005; Norris, Oppenheim, & Rowland, 2008)
Summary
Open access (OA) citation effect studies have looked at a number of disciplines but not yet the field of communication studies. Open access advocates find this measure valuable as it may show the greater impact that OA articles have over other scholarly articles that remain behind a toll-access (TA) gateway To support this theory, a number of studies have compared the intra-journal citation rates for published articles made OA via deposit into a repository with the citation rates for articles that remain behind a paywall. Several studies have branched out from the natural sciences into various social science fields (Antelman, 2004; Norris, Oppenheim, & Rowland, ., 2008; Atchison & Bull, 2015), but so far none have examined citation rates for OA articles in the discipline of communication studies, which encompasses a broad range of subdisciplines, including communication theory, health communication, mass media, interpersonal communication, political communication, and performance studies (National Communication Association, 2015). In researching the OA citation effect on communication studies, this study will seek to answer the following questions:
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