For two decades, the push for open access in scientific publishing has championed immediate free access to research papers as a catalyst for faster dissemination and accelerated progress. A recent study, spanning from 2010 to 2019 and analyzing 19 million scholarly works, now provides concrete evidence supporting the advantages of open access.
Published in Scientometrics, the research highlights two key findings: open-access papers not only accumulate more citations overall but also attract citations from a more diverse range of locations, institutions, and fields of research. Furthermore, a "citation diversity advantage" was identified for open-access articles deposited in "green" public repositories.
Patricia Brandes and Jonathan Young, science and technology reference librarians at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, laud the study's focus on the potential reach of open access, emphasizing its impact on diverse audiences.
The researchers assessed the citations of scholarly works, noting a consistent superiority of open-access papers on scales like the Shannon Index and Gini's Diversity Index, which quantify the variety among citing authors. This trend persisted across different scholar characteristics, countries, and regions, providing a robust foundation for the findings.
Lead author Chun-Kai "Karl" Huang, a research fellow at Curtin University, underscores the significance of measuring citation diversity, stating it offers more reliable evidence of increased usage of open-access papers compared to merely counting citations. The study refutes potential inflation of open-access citation numbers due to selective author choices or institutional prestige.
Notably, the study reveals a global discrepancy in reaping the benefits of open access, with the citation diversity advantage most pronounced for papers from wealthy regions like North America and Northern Europe. The authors acknowledge the need for further research to understand this disparity, considering previous findings that financial barriers in poorer countries hinder open-access publishing.
Intriguingly, the study also distinguishes between "green" and "gold" open access, suggesting that the former, where manuscripts are deposited in public repositories, yields a greater citation diversity advantage. Huang speculates this may be due to increased discoverability when papers are available in multiple repositories.
This finding holds implications for the ongoing debate over open-access business models, particularly the sustainability of "green" open access. Publishers argue that "gold" open access ensures the final version of record, while advocates of "green" emphasize minor differences. The study suggests that the increased visibility of "green" papers may influence the reading habits of subscribers to paywalled journals.
As the scientific community continues to grapple with the evolving landscape of open access, this study provides valuable insights into the tangible benefits and SEO advantages of making research more accessible to a wider audience.
More: https://www.science.org/content/article/open-access-papers-draw-more-citations-broader-readership
