[BOAI] Open access versus subscription journals: a comparison of scientific impact

[Iryna Kuchma]

[Forwarded message from David Solomon via SPARC-OAForum]

Open access versus subscription journals: a comparison of scientific impact

Bo-Christer Björk and David Solomon

Bo-Christer Björk and I recently published the following article in BMC
Medicine. We found the professionally published OA journals launched in the
last decade that are getting into the major citation databases,
particularly in biomedicine have essentially the same citation rates as
their subscription counterparts. Not surprising but in the face of so much
talk about low quality author funded OA journals, it is good to have the
other side of the story being disseminated.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/10/73

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 of OA
journals with subscription journals, controlling for journal age, the
country of the publisher, discipline and (for OA publishers) their business
model.

Methods
The 2-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 performed 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. A total of 610 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 that had been launched prior to 1996. OA journals that fund
publishing with article processing charges (APCs) are on average cited more
than other OA journals. In medicine and health, OA journals founded in the
last 10 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.
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