NEWS

Research confirms 50% greater impact of open access papers, despite delayed availability

1science and her sister company Science-Metrix are presenting the first results of an ongoing large-scale study on open access. The results reveal that open access papers have a 50% greater citation advantage than papers published in traditional subscription-based journals.  

The new research also shows that the widely held belief that open access papers have a greater impact at least in part due to them being available earlier than their commercially published versions is not consistent with the large-scale data collected by 1science. In fact, based on a time series comprising more than 17.4 million papers published between 2000 and 2015, it is clear that open access still suffers from the effect of embargoes enforced by traditional publishers who maintain that they require that delay to keep the subscription model alive.  

This evidence suggests that traditional scholarly journals that restrict access by enforcing subscription paywalls and embargoes will lose their relevance for researchers and governments. Researchers want their papers to be cited as it demonstrates the relevance of their research, and governments want papers to be as widely available as possible as a large part of scholarly and scientific research is financed through public funds.  

Read the oaNumbr #1 report online: http://www.1science.com/oanumbr.html
Download the oaNumbr #1 report: http://1science.com/PDF/oaNumber_OACA_3million_paper.pdf