Nature Communications: citation analysis

"Nature Communications is a multidisciplinary journal, publishing high-quality research from all areas of the natural sciences. It was established in 2010. Authors can publish either through the traditional subscribed access route or make their paper open access (OA) through payment of an article-processing charge (APC). A large number of authors have chosen the OA option. This report seeks to answer the questions: • Are OA articles cited more frequently than non-OA articles? • Are OA articles cited sooner than non-OA articles? • Are there differences by subject area in patterns of citation for OA and non-OA articles? • Are there differences in web-based activity (HTML views and PDF downloads) for OA and non-OA articles? The analysis is based on data provided by NPG on the numbers of articles published each year as they were assigned to four subject areas, and of citations to those articles as recorded in Web of Knowledge. This report is intended to be an exploratory white paper, analysing machine-generated data on a bounded set of articles. The report seeks only to present the raw normalized data, and does not investigate the reasons for the observed differences. The reasons may be complex and due to a number of factors, and more research is needed to understand them fully, but none of these factors were part of the original scope of our report."