New research from Springer Nature confirms value in ‘Going for Gold’

Going for gold: exploring the reach and impact of Gold open access articles in hybrid journals offers important additional analysis. In looking at the specific non-OA subset of subscription articles where an earlier version (such as a Green OA accepted manuscript) exists in an OA repository, it shows that there is no significant corresponding ‘Green OA effect’; the availability of a ‘Green’ version is not sufficient to match the benefits of Gold OA given that the Version of Record (VOR) of the article it is attached to remains behind a paywall.

The main findings are:

• Gold OA articles achieve greater impact compared to subscription articles with earlier versions available e.g. via Green OA routes. On average, the latter type only achieves 1.07 times higher citations than non-OA articles, compared with 1.64 times higher achieved by Gold OA articles;
• Gold OA articles achieve far greater attention and awareness with nearly five times higher Altmetric Attention Scores compared to non-OA articles, while subscription articles with earlier versions available e.g. via Green OA routes only have two times higher Altmetric scores than non-OA articles in hybrid journals;
• Gold OA articles continue to be used more with results showing that they are downloaded over six times more than non-OA articles
• Variations by discipline are seen but Gold OA exceeds the reach and impact of both non-OA articles and subscription articles with earlier versions available.''