Abstract
The present study aims to analyze (1) the relationship between Citation Normalized Score of scientific publications and Article Processing Charges (APCs) of Gold Open Access (OA) publications (2) the determinants of APCs. To do so, we used APCs information provided by the OpenAPC database, citation scores of publications from the WoS database and, for Altmetrics, data from Altmetrics.com database, over the period from 2006 to 2019 for 83,752 articles published in 4751 journals belonging to 267 distinct publishers. Results show that contrary to common belief, paying high APCs does not necessarily increase the impact of publications. First, large publishers with high impact are not the most expensive. Second, publishers with the highest APCs are not necessarily the best in terms of impact. Correlation between APCs and impact is moderate. Regarding the determinants, results indicate that APCs are on average 50% higher in hybrid journals than in full OA journals. The results also suggest that Altmetrics do not have a great impact: OA articles that have garnered the most attention on internet are articles with relatively low APCs. Another interesting result is that the "number of readers" indicator is more effective as it is more correlated with classic bibliometrics indicators than the Altmetrics score.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Asai, S. (2019). Determinants of article processing charges for medical open access journals. Journal of Electronic Publishing, 22(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0022.103.
Bautista-Puig, N., et al. (2020). Do journals flip** to gold open access show an OA citation or publication advantage? Scientometrics, 124(3), 2551–2575. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03546-x
Besancenot, D., & Vranceanu, R. (2017). A model of scholarly publishing with hybrid academic journals. Theory and Decision, 82(1), 131–150. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11238-016-9553-0
Björk, B.-C. (2004). Open access to scientific publications—An analysis of the barriers to change?. Available at: https://helda.helsinki.fi/dhanken/handle/10227/647. Accessed: March 6, 2020.
Björk, B.-C., & Solomon, D. (2012). Open access versus subscription journals: A comparison of scientific impact. BMC Medicine, 10(1), 73. https://doi.org/10.1186/1741-7015-10-73
Björk, B.-C., & Solomon, D. (2015). Article processing charges in OA journals: Relationship between price and quality. Scientometrics, 103(2), 373–385. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1556-z
Bruns, A., Rimmert, C. & Taubert, N. (2020). Who pays? Comparing cost sharing models for a Gold Open Access publication environment. ar**v:2002.12092 [cs]. Available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/2002.12092. Accessed: March 4, 2020.
Cary, M., & Rockwell, T. (2020). International collaboration in open access publications: How income shapes international collaboration. Publications, 8(1), 13. https://doi.org/10.3390/publications8010013
Chen-Chi, C. (2006). Business models for open access journals publishing. Online Information Review, 30(6), 699–713. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520610716171
Copiello, S. (2020). Business as usual with article processing charges in the transition towards OA publishing: A case study based on Elsevier. Publications, 8(1), 3. https://doi.org/10.3390/publications8010003
Elmore, S. A. (2018). The altmetric attention score: What does it mean and why should i care? Toxicologic Pathology, 46(3), 252–255. https://doi.org/10.1177/0192623318758294
Eysenbach, G. (2006). Citation advantage of open access articles. PLoS Biology. Edited by C. Tenopir, 4(5), e157. Doi:https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0040157.
Ghane, M. R., Niazmand, M. R., & Sabet Sarvestani, A. (2020). The citation advantage for open access science journals with and without article processing charges. Journal of Information Science, 46(1), 118–130. https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551519837183
Gumpenberger, C., Ovalle-Perandones, M.-A., & Gorraiz, J. (2013). On the impact of gold open access journals. Scientometrics, 96(1), 221–238. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-012-0902-7
Khoo, S. (2019). Article processing charge hyperinflation and price insensitivity: An open access sequel to the serials crisis. LIBER Quarterly, 29(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.18352/lq.10280
Larivière, V., et al. (2015). Team size matters: Collaboration and scientific impact since 1900. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 66(7), 1323–1332. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23266
Maddi, A. (2020). Measuring open access publications: A novel normalized open access indicator. Scientometrics, 124(1), 379–398. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03470-0
Maddi, A., & Gingras, Y. (2021). Gender diversity in research teams and citation impact in economics and management. Journal of Economic Surveys, 35(5), 1381–1404. https://doi.org/10.1111/joes.12420
Maddi, A. & Sapinho, D. (2021). article processing charges based publications: To which extent the price explains scientific impact?. In: 18th International Conference on Scientometrics & Informetrics. Leuven, Belgium: International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (I.S.S.I.), pp. 741–752. Available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/2107.07348. Accessed: August 19, 2021.
Maddi, A., Lardreau, E., & Sapinho, D. (2021). Open access in Europe: A national and regional comparison. Scientometrics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-03887-1
OST (2019). Dynamics of scientific production in the world, in Europe and in France, 2000–2016. Paris, France: HCERES, p. 100. Available at: https://www.hceres.fr/fr/publications/dynamics-scientific-production-world-europe-and-france-2000-2016-ost. Accessed: September 23, 2020.
Pinfield, S., Salter, J., & Bath, P. A. (2016). The “total cost of publication” in a hybrid open-access environment: Institutional approaches to funding journal article-processing charges in combination with subscriptions. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 67(7), 1751–1766. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23446
Piwowar, H., et al. (2018). The state of OA: A large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles. PeerJ, 6, e4375. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4375
Prosser, D. (2003). The next information revolution—How open access repositories and journals will transform scholarly communications. LIBER Quarterly, 14(1). Doi: https://doi.org/10.18352/lq.7755.
Repiso, R., Castillo-Esparcia, A., & Torres-Salinas, D. (2019). Altmetrics, alternative indicators for Web of Science Communication studies journals. Scientometrics, 119(2), 941–958. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03070-7
Rizor, S. L., & Holley, R. P. (2014). Open access goals revisited: How green and gold open access are meeting (or not) their original goals. Journal of Scholarly Publishing. https://doi.org/10.3138/jsp.45.4.01
Schönfelder, N. (2020). Article processing charges: Mirroring the citation impact or legacy of the subscription-based model? Quantitative Science Studies, 1(1), 6–27. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00015
Solomon, D. J., & Björk, B.-C. (2012). A study of open access journals using article processing charges. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63(8), 1485–1495. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.22673
Sotudeh, H., & Estakhr, Z. (2018). Sustainability of open access citation advantage: The case of Elsevier’s author-pays hybrid open access journals. Scientometrics, 115(1), 563–576. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2663-4
Sotudeh, H., Ghasempour, Z., & Yaghtin, M. (2015). The citation advantage of author-pays model: The case of Springer and Elsevier OA journals. Scientometrics, 104(2), 581–608. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1607-5
Sud, P., & Thelwall, M. (2014). Evaluating altmetrics. Scientometrics, 98(2), 1131–1143. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1117-2
Tananbaum, G. (2003). Of wolves and and boys: The scholarly communication crisis. Learned Publishing, 16(4), 285–289. https://doi.org/10.1087/095315103322422035
Thelwall, M. (2020). Measuring societal impacts of research with altmetrics? Common problems and mistakes. Journal of Economic Surveys, n/a(n/a). Doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/joes.12381.
Traag, V. & Waltman, L. (2019). Persistence of journal hierarchy in open access publishing. In: 17th International conference on scientometrics and informetrics. STI2019, Rome, Italy, pp. 1339–1345. Available at: https://zenodo.org/record/3250081/files/483_Plan%20S.pdf?download=1.
Waltman, L. & Traag, V. A. (2017). Use of the journal impact factor for assessing individual articles need not be wrong. ar**v:1703.02334 [cs]. Available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1703.02334. Accessed: March 6, 2020.
Waltman, L., et al. (2011). Towards a new crown indicator: Some theoretical considerations. Journal of Informetrics, 5(1), 37–47. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2010.08.001
Yang, S., et al. (2021). Are Altmetric.com scores effective for research impact evaluation in the social sciences and humanities? Journal of Informetrics, 15(1), 101120. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2020.101120
Zhang, L., & Watson, E. M. (2017). Measuring the impact of gold and green open access. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 43(4), 337–345. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2017.06.004
Acknowledgement
The present paper is a substantially extended version of the contribution (Maddi and Sapinho, 2021) presented at the ISSI 2021—18th International Conference on Scientometrics & Informetrics—Leuven, Belgium. The authors would like to thank the anonymous referees and the guest-editor for their very helpful comments, which have significantly improved the quality of this paper.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Maddi, A., Sapinho, D. Article processing charges, altmetrics and citation impact: Is there an economic rationale?. Scientometrics 127, 7351–7368 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04284-y
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04284-y