Springer Nature’s 2018 white paper, Assessing the open access effect for hybrid journals, highlighted ‘the OA effect’ and showed that OA articles in hybrid journals achieve greater impact, usage and reach than comparative non-OA articles. Going for gold: exploring the reach and impact of Gold open access articles in hybrid journals offers important additional analysis. In looking at the specific non-OA subset of subscription articles where an earlier version (such as a Green OA accepted manuscript) exists in an OA repository, it shows that there is no significant corresponding ‘Green OA effect’; the availability of a ‘Green’ version is not sufficient to match the benefits of Gold OA given that the Version of Record (VOR) of the article it is attached to remains behind a paywall.
Category: White Papers
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