What happens when a journal converts to open access? A bibliometric analysis

In recent years, increased stakeholder pressure to transition research to Open Access has led to many journals converting, or ‘flipping’, from a closed access (CA) to an open access (OA) publishing model. Changing the publishing model can influence the decision of authors to submit their papers to a journal, and increased article accessibility may influence citation behaviour. In this paper we aimed to understand how flipping a journal to an OA model influences the journal’s future publication volumes and citation impact. We analysed two independent sets of journals that had flipped to an OA model, one from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and one from the Open Access Directory (OAD), and compared their development with two respective control groups of similar journals. For bibliometric analyses, journals were matched to the Scopus database. We assessed changes in the number of articles published over time, as well as two citation metrics at the journal and article level: the normalised impact factor (IF) and the average relative citations (ARC), respectively. Our results show that overall, journals that flipped to an OA model increased their publication output compared to journals that remained closed. Mean normalised IF and ARC also generally increased following the flip to an OA model, at a greater rate than was observed in the control groups. However, the changes appear to vary largely by scientific discipline. Overall, these results indicate that flipping to an OA publishing model can bring positive changes to a journal

The Transition to...Open Access

This report describes and draws conclusions from the transition of the Association for Learning Technology’s journal Research in Learning Technology from toll-access to Open Access, and from being published by one of the "big five" commercial publishers to being published by a specialist Open Access publisher. The focus of the report is on what happened in the run-up to and after the transition, rather than on the process of deciding to switch between publishing models, which is covered in in ALT's 2011 report "Journal tendering for societies: a brief guide" - http://repository.alt.ac.uk/887/

Measuring Openness and Evaluating Digital Academic Publishing Models: Not Quite the Same Business

In this article we raise a problem, and we offer two practical contributions to its solution. The problem is that academic communities interested in digital publishing do not have adequate tools to help them in choosing a publishing model that suits their needs. We believe that excessive focus on Open Access (OA) has obscured some important issues; moreover exclusive emphasis on increasing openness has contributed to an agenda and to policies that show clear practical shortcomings. We believe that academic communities have different needs and priorities; therefore there cannot be a ranking of publishing models that fits all and is based on only one criterion or value. We thus believe that two things are needed. First, communities need help in working out what they want from their digital publications. Their needs and desiderata should be made explicit and their relative importance estimated. This exercise leads to the formulation and ordering of their objectives. Second, available publishing models should be assessed on the basis of these objectives, so as to choose one that satisfies them well. Accordingly we have developed a framework that assists communities in going through these two steps. The framework can be used informally, as a guide to the collection and systematic organization of the information needed to make an informed choice of publishing model. In order to do so it maps the values that should be weighed and the technical features that embed them. Building on our framework, we also offer a method to produce ordinal and cardinal scores of publishing models. When these techniques are applied the framework becomes a formal decision–making tool. Finally, the framework stresses that, while the OA movement tackles important issues in digital publishing, it cannot incorporate the whole range of values and interests that are at the core of academic publishing. Therefore the framework suggests a broader agenda that is relevant in making better policy decisions around academic publishing and OA

La evolución en la comunicación científica : Uso de identificadores globales y nuevos modelos de publicación anticipada

Las revistas científicas se encuentran en un momento de evolución acelerada, en la que se incorporan nuevos servicios y tecnologías que tienen como objetivo agilizar la comunicación de la ciencia, promover la reproducibilidad de los resultados, brindar mayor transparencia a los procesos editoriales y mejorar la integración de las publicaciones en múltiples sistemas que ofrecen diversos servicios, como la obtención de métricas e indicadores, la recomendación de artículos o la preservación digital.Facultad de Ciencias Económica

La evolución en la comunicación científica: Uso de identificadores globales y nuevos modelos de publicación anticipada

Las revistas científicas se encuentran en un momento de evolución acelerada, en la que se incorporan nuevos servicios y tecnologías que tienen como objetivo agilizar la comunicación de la ciencia, promover la reproducibilidad de los resultados, brindar mayor transparencia a los procesos editoriales y mejorar la integración de las publicaciones en múltiples sistemas que ofrecen diversos servicios, como la obtención de métricas e indicadores, la recomendación de artículos o la preservación digital