1science, a provider of software tools and analytics to accelerate the transition to open access, has announced the availability of the first results of a large-scale study on open access. The results reveal that freely available scholarly papers, otherwise known as open access papers, have a 50% greater citation advantage than papers published in traditional subscription-based journals.
This means 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.
The new research also shows that the widely held belief that open access papers have a greater impact 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 tie 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.
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