Title:
Contribution of the Open Access Modality to the Impact of Hybrid Journals Controlling by Field and Time Effects
Authors:
Pablo Dorta-González
University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, TiDES Research Institute, 35017 Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain
&
María Isabel Dorta-González
University of La Laguna, 38271 La Laguna, Spain
Published:
Journal of Data and Information Science, Volume 7, Issue 2, 19 April 2022
Part of abstract:
Purpose:
Researchers are more likely to read and cite papers to which they have access than those that they cannot obtain. Thus, the objective of this work is to analyze the contribution of the Open Access (OA) modality to the impact of hybrid journals.
Design/methodology/approach:
The “research articles” in the year 2017 from 200 hybrid journals in four subject areas, and the citations received by such articles in the period 2017-2020 in the Scopus database, were analyzed. The hybrid OA papers were compared with the paywalled ones. The journals were randomly selected from those with share of OA papers higher than some minimal value. More than 60 thousand research articles were analyzed in the sample, of which 24% under the OA modality.
Findings:
We obtain at journal level that cites per article in both hybrid modalities (OA and paywalled) strongly correlate. However, there is no correlation between the OA prevalence and cites per article. There is OA citation advantage in 80% of hybrid journals. Moreover, the OA citation advantage is consistent across fields and held in time. We obtain an OA citation advantage of 50% in average, and higher than 37% in half of the hybrid journals. Finally, the OA citation advantage is higher in Humanities than in Science and Social Science.