Sustainability of open access citation advantage: the case of Elsevier’s author-pays hybrid open access journals

Abstract

The present study tended to investigate the sustainability of citation advantage of author-pays hybrid open access journals. Applying a comparative citation analysis method, it explored a sample consisted of 160,168 articles in 47 Elsevier APC-funded hybrid open access journals published in the periods 2007–2011 and 2012–2015. Two citation windows were selected in the study: one ranging from the journals’ publication years until 2013 (obtained from Sotudeh et al. in Scientometrics 104(2):581–608, 2015), and another ranging from the journals’ publication years until 2016 (data collection date in the present study). The comparative citation analysis of the older articles (published in 2007–2011) in the two mentioned citation windows indicated that they sustained their citation advantage in comparison with the toll-access ones. The citation advantage was also confirmed for more recent APC-funded OA articles (published in 2012–2015). Therefore, the passage of time did not seem to affect the citation gap between APC-funded OA and toll-access articles, and the citation advantage of the APC-funded OA articles was apparently a sustainable phenomenon. Moreover, the number of the APC-funded OA articles increased in comparison with that of the toll-gated articles. In addition, the APC-funded OA articles exhibited citation advantages in almost all fields.