“Open Access Effects” – The influence of structural and author-specific factors on the impact of OA publicatons from various disciplines

The project describes the transformation process from traditional to Open Access (OA) publishing from a bibliometric view, and analyses existing (and potentially future) publication strategies and conflicts in connection with OA.

Structural and author-specific factors influencing the impact of OA publications in the Social Sciences, Economics and selected Natural Sciences are investigated systematically, longitudinally and comprehensively. Traditional and altmetric indicators will verify the validity of the most established theses on OA. We focus on the most relevant theses and influencing factors discussed in the literature, and attempt to validate the theses, quantify the effects, discover causal relationships and answer novel questions. We ask: where does the “genuine” OA-effect lie (i.e. in terms of increased citations/altmetrics due to increased accessibility), and to what extent is it related to different combinations of structural and author-specific properties?

The study will be based on approx. 1.38 million articles from approx. 700 Gold OA scientific journals. These articles will be aggregated into three work packages, e.g. on the level of authors, and analysis in terms of bibliometrics and altmetrics. In addition, we will carry out quantitative surveys and interviews with authors who have published/cited/shared OA articles, to validate the results of the bibliometric and altmetric studies, and to gain deeper insights into, probably discipline specific, OA publication and citation behaviour of authors. These findings will flow into a model of the transdisciplinary and discipline-specific causal relationships. The three work packages are divided into analyses of the structural properties of OA publications (WP1), of author-specific properties (WP2), and author surveys (WP3), and will finally be summarised in a “Lessons Learned” report from the OASE project.

Project duration

01.03.2018 - 28.02.2023

Funded by

Federal Ministry for Education and Research