Open Access Journals in the 2015 Journal Citation Process | Clarivate Analytics

"With 8% of all journals listed in the 2015 JCR identified as Open Access (OA), we decided to examine these publications to determine if there were some easily observable distinguishing characteristics among them. For example, as a collection, do OA journals have measurably greater citation impact as a group as compared to the entire population of publications in the 2015 JCR? Are OA journals concentrated in a narrow band of disciplines or are they present in many areas of scholarly research? Do OA journals originate in a few countries or has the OA model been adopted globally?

To begin with, we saw immediately that the OA journals in JCR cover an extremely wide range of Journal Impact Factors (JIFs). Around 40% of our OA journals have JIFs less than 1. Among all journals in the JCR we see that around 38% have JIFs less than 1. At the other end of the JIF range we found that 0.11% of OA journals have JIFs greater than 20.

At the high end of the JIF range are ten journals that include three from Germany (EMBO Molecular Medicine; Living Reviews in Solar Physics; Living Reviews in Relativity). Living Reviews in Solar Physics and Living Reviews in Relativity, with 2015 JIFs of 19.333 and 32000 respectively are published by the Max Planck Institute.

The top ten also include two from the United States (Molecular Systems Biology; PLOS Medicine), and four from England (Genome Biology; Nature Communications; Lancet Global Health; Materials Today).

There is one journal among the top ten high JIF group from the People’s Republic of China, namely, Light-Science & Applications. Light is published by the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Changchun Institute of Optics Fine Mechanics and Physics in cooperation with Nature Publishing Group. The presence of this journal among the high JIF OA titles is a notable event. It has been 20 years since The People’s Republic of China fully embraced the criteria and principles described in the Web of Science Journal Selection Process. Over that period of time they have made remarkable progress transforming their entire scholarly publishing industry. Their approach to communicating Chinese scholarly research to and collaborating with the international community of researchers has been transformed over the last two decades. Joining forces with major international publishers such as Nature Publishing Group is a key element in this work. Clarivate Analytics is honored to have partnered with them in this effort."