Auburn University Libraries / AU librarians and biologists team up and use big data to investigate open access publishing models | What's New at the Auburn Libraries

"Open access publishing models are a hot topic at Auburn University Libraries, so when Dr. Laurie Stevison wanted to incorporate a project on open access into her computational biology course, she turned to her librarians. Her collaboration with Patricia Hartman, biology liaison librarian, and Ali Krzton, the research data management librarian, developed into a quantitative study of the effects of open access on citation count. The resulting research article, “Does it pay to pay? A comparison of the benefits of open-access publishing across various subfields in biology”, was recently published in the journal PeerJ.

Biologists, in particular, are often confronted with expensive article processing charges (APCs) when they want publishers to make their work available under an open license (known as the “gold” model of open access). To find out whether paying these APCs is worthwhile for authors, Stevison’s interdisciplinary team analyzed five years of bibliographic records totaling 146,415 articles in 152 biology journals offering both open and subscription-access options. This large dataset was then analyzed to discover whether open articles enjoyed a citation advantage over comparable articles behind a paywall. They found that while paying APCs to make articles open via the “gold” route did yield increased citations, a more economical model of open access provided similar benefits.

“Green” open access involves placing articles into public repositories at no cost to the author. In the study, articles open via the “green” route were also cited more than subscription-access articles. At Auburn University, any AU-affiliated researcher can archive their work in the institutional repository, Auburn University repository of research assets (AUrora). Articles deposited in AUrora are indexed in Google Scholar and appear as alternate open versions of the paywalled originals in the search results. “We always encourage researchers to deposit their work into AUrora to support public access and increase their scholarly impact,” said Krzton, who manages the repository. “It’s good to see empirical evidence that institutional repositories accomplish those goals.” ..."