The study examines whether there exist any similarities in impact, author collaboration, and prestige between Open Access (OA) and Subscription based (SB) Library and Information Science (LIS) journals. The study selected highly appearing 32 core LIS journals in all four quartiles of SCImago database during 2018–2022. The Scopus database was utilized to extract CiteScore, SNIP, Total Articles, Citations, and publications data from 2018 to 2022, while h5-index was calculated manually and SJR scores were extracted from SCImago. Statistical tests (Student’s t-test and Mann-Whitney U-test) were conducted in R software, guided by normality and variance checks. The study reveals that SB LIS journals outperformed OA LIS journals in terms of impact and prestige based on several statistical tests on CiteScore and h5-index data. However, there was no significant difference in SNIP indicator for both datasets. On the contrary, the study revealed similarities in the degree of author collaboration in both datasets, with no significant difference. Besides, the study also determines SB LIS journals have a significant advantage in articles published per year and citations garnered per year during the study period. The insights of this study would help LIS researchers, stakeholders, and policymakers to consider OA publishing as an alternate medium for scholarly communication. It is vital for OA LIS journal stakeholders to consistently improve productivity, quality, and the peer review process, to slowly diminish the gap between OA and SB journals in terms of impact and prestige.
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