Do journals flipping to gold open access show an OA citation or publication advantage?

Abstract

The effects of Open Access (OA) upon journal performance are investigated. The key research question holds: How does the citation impact and publication output of journals switching ("flipping") from non-OA to Gold-OA develop after their switch to Gold-OA? A review is given of the literature, with an emphasis on studies dealing with flipping journals. Two study sets with 119 and 100 flipping journals, derived from two different OA data sources (DOAJ and OAD), are compared with two control groups, one based on a standard bibliometric criterion, and a second controlling for a journal's national orientation. Comparing post-switch indicators with pre-switch ones in paired T-tests, evidence was obtained of an OA Citation advantage but not of an OA Publication Advantage. Shifts in the affiliation countries of publishing and citing authors are characterized in terms of countries' income class and geographical world region. Suggestions are made for qualitative follow-up studies to obtain more insight into OA-or reverse OA-flipping.

What happens when a journal converts to open access? A bibliometric analysis

“…We have presented one of few studies on journals which flipped from a CA to an OA model and its effect on journal publication volumes, article-and journal-level citations metrics and how these compare to journals which still pursue the CA model. The literature reporting studies on flipped journals shows that journals' IFs usually increase after flipping (Bautista-Puig et al, 2020;Busch, 2014a). Our results agree with these previous findings, but show that whilst IF and ARC increase generally in the years following flipping, they vary greatly across scientific fields.…”

“…Note that journal metadata in DOAJ is provided by the publishers directly and is thus not "verified" by any third party. As Sotudeh and Horri (2007) and Bautista-Puig et al (2020) have shown this can often lead to inaccurate data, e.g., in terms of flipping date. To build a group of flipped journals, we extracted details of all journals in DOAJ as well as the flipping year.…”

“…Different publishers bring differences in platform quality and visibility, and these may also have an effect, for example, on the willingness of authors to publish their work with a journal. Bautista-Puig et al (2020) also investigated how countries of publishing and citing authors change before and after a flip, which is important for understanding exactly who is supporting new OA models and what effect that may have on bibliometric indicators and publishing behaviour. In addition, long-term changes in the support of institutions and funders, as well as increasing pressure to transition to OA models will mean that the findings presented here will evolve over time.…”

“…This study addresses both of these aspects, building on work presented in Momeni et al (2019) but substantially expanding its scope, in terms of the data sources of flipped journals and the bibliometric data analysed (from Web of Science to Scopus). Moreover, in this study we included a comparison of flipped journals and journals from the same disciplines that still publish under the CA model (as suggested recently by Bautista-Puig et al, 2020). We aim to answer the following research questions:…”

Yes! We’re open. Open science and the future of academic practices in translation and interpreting studies

“…For instance, citations to articles tend to increase (Archambault et al, 2016) and, as a consequence, so does impact measured with journal-level metrics (Momeni et al, 2021). 20 Another positive consequence is that the number of articles by authors from low-and middle-income countries increases (Bautista-Puig et al, 2020). Integrating altmetric indicators into published articles would help scholars to easily obtain document-level metrics.…”