Does Open Access Foster Interdisciplinary Citation? Decomposing Open Access Citation Advantage

TL;DR

This study investigates whether open access, especially gold OA, promotes interdisciplinary citation across natural sciences, revealing that OA increases both interdisciplinary and within-discipline citations, thereby fostering knowledge transfer.

Contribution

It decomposes the OA citation advantage to specifically analyze its effect on interdisciplinary citations across various fields, highlighting new insights into OA's role in knowledge transfer.

Findings

OA increases interdisciplinary citations in chemistry, computer science, and clinical medicine.

OA boosts both interdisciplinary and within-discipline citations in many fields.

Clinical medicine benefits from increased interdisciplinary citations without journal or paper influence.

Abstract

The existence of an open access (OA) citation advantage, that is, whether OA increases citations, has been a topic of interest for many years. Although numerous previous studies have focused on whether OA increases citations, expectations for OA go beyond that. One such expectation is the promotion of knowledge transfer across various fields. This study aimed to clarify whether OA, especially gold OA, increases interdisciplinary citations in various natural science fields. Specifically, we measured the effect of OA on interdisciplinary and within-discipline citation counts by decomposing an existing metric of the OA citation advantage. The results revealed that OA increases both interdisciplinary and within-discipline citations in many fields and increases only interdisciplinary citations in chemistry, computer science, and clinical medicine. Among these fields, clinical medicine tends to obtain more interdisciplinary citations without being influenced by specific journals or papers. The findings indicate that OA fosters knowledge transfer to different fields, which extends our understanding of its effects.