Identifying the effect of open access on citations using a panel of science journals
Open accessAbstract
An open‐access journal allows free online access to its articles, obtaining revenue from fees charged to submitting authors or from institutional support. Using panel data on science journals, we are able to circumvent problems plaguing previous studies of the impact of open access on citations. In contrast to the huge effects found in these previous studies, we find a more modest effect: moving from paid to open access increases cites by 8% on average in our sample. The benefit is concentrated among top‐ranked journals. In fact, open access causes a statistically significant reduction in cites to the bottom‐ranked journals in our sample, leading us to conjecture that open access may intensify competition among articles for readers' attention, generating losers as well as winners. (JEL L17, O33)
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McCabe & Snyder (2014) used a complex statistical model to remove confounding effects of author selection and reported a small but meaningful 8% open access citation advantage.
“McCabe & Snyder (2014) used a complex statistical model to remove confounding effects of author selection (authors may selectively publish their higher-impact work as OA), reporting a small but meaningful 8% OACA.”
From The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles (2018) · cites this paper as McCabe & Snyder (2014)
Recent investigations using robust methods have continued to observe an open access citation advantage.
“However, recent investigations using robust methods have continued to observe an OACA.”
From The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles (2018) · cites this paper as McCabe & Snyder (2014)
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- Authors
- McCABE, M. J., & SNYDER, C. M.
- Affiliations
- Boston University (US)
- Dartmouth College (US)
- Corresponding author
- McCABE, MARK J.
- SNYDER, CHRISTOPHER M.
- Venue
- Economic Inquiry
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2014-02-20
- Volume
- 52
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 1284-1300
- ISSN
- 0043-3640 (ISSN-L)
- 0095-2583
- 1465-7295
- OpenAlex
- W3121567788
- Cited by
- 168
- References
- 2
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 15 · 2023: 17 · 2022: 11 · 2021: 21 · 2020: 19 · 2019: 14 · 2018: 15 · 2017: 17 · 2016: 14 · 2015: 4 · 2014: 8 · 2012: 1
- FWCI
- 14.02
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Economic Inquiry (publishedVersion, other-oa)
- HAL (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Deep Blue (University of Michigan) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst
- Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Information Systems and Management › Academic Publishing and Open Access
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Publishing and Scholarly Communication
- Keywords
- open access, citation impact, scientific journals, journal rankings, article visibility, scholarly publishing
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