Do open access journals have a greater citation impact? A study of journals in library and information science
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/CC-03-2022-0010 |
| Published date | 20 June 2022 |
| Date | 20 June 2022 |
| Pages | 13-24 |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Collection building & management |
| Author | Daud Khan,Mohammad Ashar,Mayank Yuvaraj |
Do open access journals have a greater citation
impact? A study of journals in library and
information science
Daud Khan
Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India
Mohammad Ashar
Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan, Dantewada, India, and
Mayank Yuvaraj
Central Library, Central University of South Bihar, Patna, India
Abstract
Purpose –This study aims to investigate the research and citation impact of open access (OA) journals versus non-OA journals being published in
the spectrum of library and information science (LIS) across the world and to further ascertain whet her OA journals have greater citation counts than
subscription-based journals in LIS discipline.
Design/methodology/approach –A total of 116 LIS journals (58 OA and 58 non-OA) were chosen from Scimago website. After selecting the
journals, Publish or Perish software program was used to retrieve the publications and their corresponding academic citations by using International
Standard Serial Number of journals from Google Scholar for the period of 2011–2018. The non-parametric Mann–Whitney U-test was applied on
various research and citation indicators, namely, citation count, citations per author, citations per paper; g-index, h-index, hI norm and hI annual
through SPSS.
Findings –Findings of the study demonstrate that non-OA journals in LIS have a significant citation advantage over OA journals. Moreover, Mann–
Whitney U-test analysis rejected all the eight null hypotheses and reveals that non-OA journals in LIS discipline have greater citation counts,
citations per author, citations per paper; g-index, h-index, hI norm and hI annual than OA journals.
Originality/value –To the best of the authors’knowledge, this is the first study that embarks upon a whole-scale investigation of citation impact of
OA and non-OA journals in LIS, which has implications for both research and practice. This study would serve as a reference guide to all involved in
scholarly communication activities including academic communities, librarians, research funders, publishers and policymakers for publishing
research work, grant funding, designing policies and subscriptions.
Keywords Open access, Citation impact, Library and information science, Scholarly communication, Journals, Library science journals
Paper type Case study
Introduction
During the past few decades, the system of scholarly
communication has seen tremendous changes primarily due to
technological, economical, legal, ethical and political aspects
(Möller, 2006;Perianes-Rodríguez and Olmeda-G
omez, 2019;
Rao, 2001;Thorin, 2003). In the contemporary scenario, there
are two main models of scholarly communication, namely,
traditional subscription-based model and open access model
(Björk and Solomon, 2012;Holmberg et al.,2020). Traditional
subscription-based model of scholarly communication generally
entails readers to pay for the accessibility and utilization of
content (Nazim and Ashar, 2018). On the contrary, open access
scholarly communication model refers to the unrestricted access
to scholarly research, or as the most referenced definition of open
access given by BOAI (2002) states that:
[...]the free availability of literature on the public internet, permitting any users
to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of
these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use
them forany other lawful purposewithout financial,legal, or technicalbarriers
otherthan thoseinseparable fromgaining accessto the Internetitself.
The rationale behindthe manifestation of open access scholarly
communication model is based on the fact that majority of the
research projects are generally financed through public funds
and it would be quite unfair that society ought to pay twice to
get access to the findings of the scholarly researches that it has
sponsored itself.Moreover, regardless of how the researches are
funded, access to scientific knowledge should be a guaranteed
right to assist to lessen the existing gaps among institutions,
regions and countries (Bjork, 2017;Hua et al.,2017;
Veletsianos and Kimmons, 2012) and to bridge the North-
South research divide globally (Adcock and Fottrell, 2008).
There are two major pathwaysthrough which availability of OA
The current issue and full text archiveof this journal is available on Emerald
Insight at: https://www.emerald.com/insight/2514-9326.htm
Collection and Curation
42/1 (2023) 13–24
© Emerald Publishing Limited [ISSN 2514-9326]
[DOI 10.1108/CC-03-2022-0010]
Received 2 March 2022
Revised 28 May 2022
Accepted 5 June 2022
13
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