Examining Open Access Article Performance: Taking a Nearsighted Approach to a Farsighted Problem

Objectives: To determine if open-access journal articles receive more citations, downloads, and social media attention than toll-access articles in the health sciences.

Methods: Using our university’s CV database, we generated a list of faculty names and articles published between 2013-2016. The following criteria were used to refine this list: 1) the faculty member must have an active appointment in the College of Medicine, and 2) the publication must be a scholarly journal article.

After our master list was generated and refined, we identified the open access articles by looking up each journal in the Directory of Open Access Journals, and in the case of hybrid journals, viewing the article’s access options on the journal’s website.

We then manually retrieved article level metrics for each article on our list. These metrics included altmetric scores and the number of citations, downloads, and views each article received. Our primary source of data was the journal’s website. Secondary sources of data included Dimensions and the Altmetric bookmarklet.

Results: On average, articles published open access or available in the institutional repository received at least a 20% increase in number of citations, as compared to articles published exclusively behind a paywall.

Conclusions: Formal conclusions will be shared at the meeting; however, we anticipate that open-access articles will receive more citations, downloads and/or views, and higher altmetric scores on average than their toll-access counterparts. As such, authors and their institutions or funding agencies would benefit from utilizing open access publishing venues to increase the visibility of their research. Libraries have a role in facilitating open access to research by establishing institutional repositories as an alternative venue for freely sharing faculty-authored publications.