A large-scale study of bibliographic data found that open-access research publications—those freely available on the internet—receive more diverse citations compared to paywalled publications, which require a subscription or payment to access. Authors who cite open-access publications (i.e., refer to them in their own scientific work) tend to come from a broader range of institutions, countries, geographic regions, and research fields. The paper was published in Scientometrics.
When a scientist completes a research study, they are generally expected to write a report describing the study and its findings and publish it in a scientific journal or another scientific outlet. However, not all scientific journals are the same. While some journals are highly prestigious, others are considered less valuable. The perceived value of a scientific paper is often influenced by the reputation of the journal in which it is published.
Many systems currently use the number of citations that articles in a scientific journal receive from other reputable journals to determine how influential and prestigious that journal is. A scientific work is cited when it is mentioned in another scientific work. The more citations a publication receives, the more influential it is considered to be.
National science funding bodies often use citation counts to assess the value of the scientific studies published in a particular journal. These evaluations play a crucial role in decisions about a researcher’s career. Whether a researcher keeps their job, secures funding, or advances in the academic hierarchy often depends on the reputation of the journals in which they publish.
This system allows publishers of highly cited journals to charge substantial fees for access, effectively paywalling their publications. Such practices make a significant portion of scientific research inaccessible to individuals and researchers from poorer countries or institutions that cannot afford these subscriptions or access fees.
To address this issue, some researchers and publishers have embraced open-access publishing. In this model, scientific publications are made freely available to everyone. Sometimes, authors pay a fee to the publisher to make their work open access. In other cases, nonprofit entities run their own scientific journals, which are freely accessible to the public.
Study author Chun-Kai Huang and his colleagues wanted to explore the relationship between open-access status and citation diversity. Specifically, they sought to determine whether making a scientific work freely available would lead to a broader range of researchers, geographically or across scientific disciplines, citing it.
To investigate this, the researchers analyzed all research outputs published between 2010 and 2019, resulting in a dataset of 19 million publications. They extracted data on the scientific publications that cited these works (420 million citation links), along with information about the citing publications and the affiliations of their authors. The data came from the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative, a large-scale relational database tracking the open knowledge performance of research institutions worldwide.
The researchers used this data to calculate measures of citation diversity. Citation diversity was assessed based on the diversity of the institutions, countries, regions, subregions, and research fields of the citing authors. A paper’s citations were considered more diverse if the authors citing it came from a broader range of different institutions, countries, regions, subregions, or research fields.
The results showed that open-access publications had higher citation diversity across all the criteria considered. They were cited by authors from a greater number of different institutions, countries, subregions, regions, and research fields compared to paywalled publications. This difference was consistent across all the years studied and across almost all research fields.
“As the main result, we find that OA [open access] is associated with higher citation diversity, i.e., OPEN outputs receive more diverse citations as compared to CLOSED [paywalled] outputs. We refer to this phenomenon as OA citation diversity advantage. We find this advantage to be remarkably consistent across the many ways in which we have analyzed the data (bar the very few extreme cases), which addresses concerns of confounding factors mentioned above,” the study authors conclude.
The study highlights an important aspect of the dissemination of scientific results. However, the authors note that their study included only scientific publications assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) by Crossref. They acknowledge that other agencies also assign DOIs, and these publications were not included in the analysis.
The paper, “Open access research outputs receive more diverse citations,” was authored by Chun‑Kai Huang, Cameron Neylon, Lucy Montgomery, Richard Hosking, James P. Diprose, Rebecca N. Handcock, and Katie Wilson.