Open access versus subscription journals: a comparison of scientific impact

Bo-Christer Björk, David Solomon

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

315 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Background

In the past few years there has been an ongoing debate as to whether the proliferation of Open Access (OA) publishing would damage the peer review system and put the quality of scientific journal publishing at risk. Our aim was to inform this debate by comparing the scientific impact and quality of Open Access with subscription journals controlling for journal age, the country of the publisher, discipline and for OA publishers their business model.

Methods

Two-year impact factors (the average number of citations to the articles in a journal) were used as a proxy for scientific impact. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) was used to identify OA journals as well as their business model. Journal age and discipline were obtained from the Ulrich’s periodicals directory. Comparisons were done on the journal level as well as on the article level where the results were weighted by the number of articles published in a journal. Six hundred and ten OA journals were compared with 7,609 subscription journals using Web of Science citation data while an overlapping set of 1,327 OA journals were compared with 11,124 subscription journals using Scopus data.

Results

Overall average citation rates, both unweighted and weighted for the number of articles per journal, were about 30% higher for subscription journals. However after controlling for discipline (medicine and health versus other), age of the journal (three time periods) and the location of the publisher (four largest publishing countries versus other countries) the differences largely disappeared in most subcategories except for journals which had been launched prior to 1996. OA journals that fund publishing with article processing charges (APCs) are on average more cited than other OA journals. In Medicine and health OA journals founded in the last ten years are receiving about as many citations as subscription journals launched during the same period.

Conclusions

Our results indicate that OA journals indexed in Web of Science and/or Scopus are approaching the same scientific impact and quality as subscription journals particularly in biomedicine and for journals funded by article processing charges.
Original languageEnglish
Peer-reviewed scientific journalBMC Medicine
Volume10
Issue number73
Number of pages9
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 17.07.2012
MoE publication typeA1 Journal article - refereed

Keywords

  • 113 Computer and information sciences
  • KOTA2012

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