Impact of Social Sciences – Across all fields, Open Access articles in Swedish repository have a higher citation rate than non-OA articles.

"Here is the thing. Citations have become an obsession within the research community. And even though researchers, university administrators, research councils and journal editors probably all agree that citations by no means is a perfect and objective way of measuring research quality, the system is nevertheless very much practical and quite successful. Open Access (OA) is not about citations, nor is it about evaluating and measuring research. OA is about making knowledge freely available to researchers, teachers, students and the public around the world. Why then care about citations rates on OA articles? Because citations are a language that researchers and university management understand. The assumption that open access leads to increased citations is widely spread among OA proponents. And proponents of this view have tended to be both passionate and argumentative. But what does it look like at Chalmers University of Technology? Research on whether OA articles receive more citations than non-OA articles officially traces its origins back to 2001 when Steve Lawrence first published a paper indicating an OA citation advantage in the field of Computer Science. Since then numerous of studies have been made on the subject. The explanations from previous studies of an OA citation advantage can be summarized as: (1) A general OA advantage: more scholars have access to papers and these therefore receive more citations. (2) An early advantage: the earlier a paper is made available, the earlier it can start accumulating citations. (3) A selection bias / quality advantage: authors choose to self-archive their best papers, and better papers attract more citations ..."