Contribution of the Open Access modality to the impact of hybrid journals controlling by field and time effects

TL;DR

This study analyzes how Open Access (OA) affects citation impact in hybrid journals across various fields, finding a consistent OA citation advantage of around 50%, especially in Humanities, regardless of field or time.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on the impact of OA in hybrid journals, controlling for field and time effects, with a large sample analysis across multiple disciplines.

Findings

80% of hybrid journals show OA citation advantage

OA citation advantage averages 50% across journals

Higher OA impact observed in Humanities than in Sciences

Abstract

Researchers are more likely to read and cite papers to which they have access than those that they cannot obtain. Thus, the objective of this work is to analyze the contribution of the Open Access (OA) modality to the impact of hybrid journals. For this, the research articles in the year 2017 from 200 hybrid journals in four subject areas, and the citations received by such articles in the period 2017-2020 in the Scopus database, were analyzed. The journals were randomly selected from those with share of OA papers higher than some minimal value. More than 60 thousand research articles were analyzed in the sample, of which 24% under the OA modality. As results, we obtain that cites per article in both hybrid modalities strongly correlate. However, there is no correlation between the OA prevalence and cites per article in any of the hybrid modalities. There is OA citation advantage in 80% of hybrid journals. Moreover, the OA citation advantage is consistent across fields and held in time. We obtain an OA citation advantage of 50% in average, and higher than 37% in half of the hybrid journals. Finally, the OA citation advantage is higher in Humanities than in Science and Social Science.