An Analysis of the Impact of Gold Open Access Publications in Computer Science

TL;DR

This paper examines how grey open access publishers influence citation metrics in computer science, revealing that their inclusion can distort impact scores like FWCI and affect research evaluation.

Contribution

It provides an analysis of the citation landscape for grey open access publishers and highlights the potential distortions in impact metrics caused by their inclusion.

Findings

Grey publishers have a significantly different citation landscape.

Including grey publications can distort impact metrics like FWCI.

Mainstream impact scores may be misleading due to grey publisher influence.

Abstract

There has been some concern about the impact of predatory publishers on scientific research for some time. Recently, publishers that might previously have been considered `predatory' have established their bona fides, at least to the extent that they are included in citation impact scores such as the field-weighted citation impact (FWCI). These are sometimes called `grey' publishers (MDPI, Frontiers, Hindawi). In this paper, we show that the citation landscape for these grey publications is significantly different from the mainstream landscape and that affording publications in these venues the same status as publications in mainstream journals may significantly distort metrics such as the FWCI.