Open-access papers draw more citations from a broader readership

For two decades, advocates of open access in scientific publishing have offered a fundamental justification: Making papers immediately free for anyone to read would speed the dissemination of findings and accelerate research progress.

Now, after years of little conclusive evidence to support these assertions, researchers report that open-access papers have a greater reach than paywalled ones in two key ways: They attract more total citations, and those citations come from scholars in a wider range of locations, institutions, and fields of research. The study also reports a “citation diversity advantage” for a controversial type of open-access articles, those deposited in “green” public repositories.

The study “gets to the heart of the possible advantage of open access, reaching diverse audiences,” write Patricia Brandes and Jonathan Young, in a joint email to Science. They are science and technology reference librarians at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, who have studied open-access citations but were not involved in the new study.