From: Ann Shumelda Okerson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2024 17:09:14 -0500

January 24, 2024.  New study addresses long-standing debate about whether free-to-read papers have increased reach

For 2 decades, advocates of open access in scientific publishing have offered a fundamental justification: Making papers immediately free for anyone to read would speed the dissemination of findings and accelerate research progress.

Now, after years of little conclusive evidence to support these assertions, researchers report that open-access papers have a greater reach than paywalled ones in two key ways: They attract more total citations, and those citations come from scholars in a wider range of locations, institutions, and fields of research. The study also reports a “citation diversity advantage” for a controversial type of open-access article, those deposited in “green” public repositories.

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But open access’ promise to widen the impact of articles isn’t reaped equally worldwide by authors, the study found. The citation diversity advantage was greatest for open-access papers published by researchers in wealthy regions such as North America and Northern Europe, which already receive large shares of all citations. Huang’s team says more research is needed to explain this effect. Previous studies have found that wealth inequalities across countries also influence whether authors can publish open-access articles at all. Many in poor countries report that the fees they must pay, which average about $2000 per article, are prohibitive—which could be cutting them off from the advantages of open access reported by Huang’s team.

More here:

https://www.science.org/content/article/open-access-papers-draw-more-citations-broader-readership