Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research

By Yassine Gargouri, Chawki Hajjem, Vincent Larivière, Yves Gingras, L. Carr, Tim Brody, Stevan Harnad. PLoS ONE, 2010

564 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background Articles whose authors have supplemented subscription-based access to the publisher's version by self-archiving their own final draft to make it accessible free for all on the web (“Open Access”, OA) are cited significantly more than articles in the same journal and year that have not been made OA. Some have suggested that this “OA Advantage” may not be causal but just a self-selection bias, because authors preferentially make higher-quality articles OA. To test this we compared self-selective self-archiving with mandatory self-archiving for a sample of 27,197 articles published 2002–2006 in 1,984 journals. Methdology/Principal Findings The OA Advantage proved just as high for both. Logistic regression analysis showed that the advantage is independent of other correlates of citations (article age; journal impact factor; number of co-authors, references or pages; field; article type; or country) and highest for the most highly cited articles. The OA Advantage is real, independent and causal, but skewed. Its size is indeed correlated with quality, just as citations themselves are (the top 20% of articles receive about 80% of all citations). Conclusions/Significance The OA advantage is greater for the more citable articles, not because of a quality bias from authors self-selecting what to make OA, but because of a quality advantage, from users self-selecting what to use and cite, freed by OA from the constraints of selective accessibility to subscribers only. It is hoped that these findings will help motivate the adoption of OA self-archiving mandates by universities, research institutions and research funders.

Subfields: History and Philosophy of Science, Information Systems and Management, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5ca2f1eb5adeee0845e23f34a332c7b485ac132d

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Citations in the corpus

The Number of Scholarly Documents on the Public Web (2014, result): “It is also worth pointing out that this estimate of 24% for the percentage of publicly accessible scholarly documents is a bit higher than the 15–20% documents estimated to be self-archived [14,15].”
How open science helps researchers succeed (2016, background): “…by selection bias (i.e., authors deliberately posting their better work to open platforms), as openly archived articles receive a citation advantage regardless of whether archiving is initiated by the author or mandated by an institution or funder (Gargouri et al., 2010; Xia and Nakanishi, 2012).”
The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles (2018, background): “As in Gargouri et al. (2010), confounding factors could be mitigated by using article-level metadata to identify article pairs published in the same journal issue, on the same topic or published by the same authors at the same time.”