The Academic, Economic and Societal Impacts of Open Access: An Evidence-Based Review
Open accessAbstract
Ongoing debates surrounding Open Access to the scholarly literature are multifaceted and complicated by disparate and often polarised viewpoints from engaged stakeholders. At the current stage, Open Access has become such a global issue that it is critical for all involved in scholarly publishing, including policymakers, publishers, research funders, governments, learned societies, librarians, and academic communities, to be well-informed on the history, benefits, and pitfalls of Open Access. In spite of this, there is a general lack of consensus regarding the potential pros and cons of Open Access at multiple levels. This review aims to be a resource for current knowledge on the impacts of Open Access by synthesizing important research in three major areas: academic, economic and societal. While there is clearly much scope for additional research, several key trends are identified, including a broad citation advantage for researchers who publish openly, as well as additional benefits to the non-academic dissemination of their work. The economic impact of Open Access is less well-understood, although it is clear that access to the research literature is key for innovative enterprises, and a range of governmental and non-governmental services. Furthermore, Open Access has the potential to save both publishers and research funders considerable amounts of financial resources, and can provide some economic benefits to traditionally subscription-based journals. The societal impact of Open Access is strong, in particular for advancing citizen science initiatives, and leveling the playing field for researchers in developing countries. Open Access supersedes all potential alternative modes of access to the scholarly literature through enabling unrestricted re-use, and long-term stability independent of financial constraints of traditional publishers that impede knowledge sharing. However, Open Access has the potential to become unsustainable for research communities if high-cost options are allowed to continue to prevail in a widely unregulated scholarly publishing market. Open Access remains only one of the multiple challenges that the scholarly publishing system is currently facing. Yet, it provides one foundation for increasing engagement with researchers regarding ethical standards of publishing and the broader implications of 'Open Research'.
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Open access has been established since the 1990s, marked by the inception of platforms such as ArXiv.org, the Open Science Institute and SciELO.
“Open access has been established since the 1990s, marked by the inception of pioneering platforms such as ArXiv.org, the Open Science Institute (later renamed to Open Science Foundations) and the Scientific Electronic Library (SciELO) in Brazil [25].”
From Do randomised clinical trials on dental caries adopt Open Science practices? (2024) · cites this paper as [25]
The “A brief history of Open Access” timeline dates the founding of the repository later named ArXiv.org to 1991 and the launch of SciELO in Brazil to 1997. It names the 1993 organization the Open Society Institute, later renamed the Open Society Foundations—not the Open Science Institute or Open Science Foundations stated in the citing sentence. (LLM, conf=0.92)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredOpen Access articles have a general media advantage over proprietary licensed articles.
“In bibliometric research on the media reception of Open Access articles (Tennant et al. 2016, pp. 7 -10), this effect is discussed as the ' general media advantage ' (Tennant et al. 2016, p. 10) of Open Access over proprietary licensed articles.”
From The structural transformation of the scientific public sphere: Constitution and consequences of the path towards open access (2024) · cites this paper as Tennant et al. 2016
There is no clear consensus on the OA effect on citation impact.
“Thus, there is no clear consensus on the OA effect on citation impact [126,129,131,152].”
From Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus: The Titans of Bibliographic Information in Today’s Academic World (2021) · cites this paper as [131]
Features that may signal a possible predatory nature of a journal include APC charges usually much lower than credible OA journals, requests to pay APC only after acceptance, absence or questionable location and composition of editorial boards, members lacking academic competencies, and failure to clearly declare manuscript submission, revision, acceptation, and licensing policies.
“For instance, the APC charges of predatory journals are usually much lower when compared with the APCs applied by credible OA journals. Additionally, often authors are requested to pay APC only after the acceptance of their manuscript. Other features include the absence or a questionable location and composition of journal editorial boards, as their members are often lacking academic competencies.”
From Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus: The Titans of Bibliographic Information in Today’s Academic World (2021) · cites this paper as [131]
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References 177 · Cited by 560
Research works printed but not linked: 4
- Sahu DK Gogtay NJ Bavdekar SB: Effect of open access on citation rates for a small biomedical journal. Fifth International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication, Chicago, September 16-18, 2005 Reference Source
- Schimmer R Geschuhn KK Vogler A: Disrupting the subscription journals’ business model for the necessary large-scale transformation to open access. 2015 10.17617/1.3 · DOI
- Suber P: Open Access. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 2012 Reference Source
- Vickery G: Review of recent studies on psi re-use and related market developments. Information Economics. 2011 Reference Source
- Authors
- Tennant, J. P., Waldner, F., Jacques, D. C., Masuzzo, P., Collister, L. B., & Hartgerink, C. H. J.
- Affiliations
- Imperial College London (GB)
- UCLouvain (BE)
- Ghent University (BE)
- University of Pittsburgh (US)
- Tilburg University (NL)
- Corresponding author
- Tennant, Jonathan P.
- ORCID
- Venue
- F1000Research
- Publisher
- F1000 Research Ltd
- Published
- 2016-09-21
- Volume
- 5
- Pages
- 632
- ISSN
- 2046-1402 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC4837983
- OpenAlex
- W2322381034
- Cited by
- 560
- References
- 177
- Citations by year
- 2026: 47 · 2025: 52 · 2024: 78 · 2023: 57 · 2022: 55 · 2021: 61 · 2020: 72 · 2019: 54 · 2018: 46 · 2017: 33 · 2016: 5
- FWCI
- 6.80
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Locations
- F1000Research (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- D-Scholarship@Pitt (University of Pittsburgh) (acceptedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- University of Pittsburgh
- European Commission (634107)
- Fonds De La Recherche Scientifique - FNRS
- Topics
- 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
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
- Keywords
- open access, scholarly publishing, citation advantage, subscription journals, research funding agencies, citizen science, developing countries, sustainability of open access, open research, publication ethics
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