Prevalence and citation advantage of gold open access in the subject areas of the Scopus database

Abstract

The potential benefit of open access (OA) in relation to citation impact has been discussed in the literature in depth. However, one problem with many studies is that they are small and restricted to one discipline or set of journals. In the present paper, an analysis of gold OA from across all areas of research is realized. Jointly with the OA citation advantage, the OA prevalence as well as the differences between access types (OA vs. non-OA) in production and referencing are tested. A total of 3,737 OA journals (16.8%) and 18,485 non-OA journals (83.2%) published in 2015 are considered. As the main conclusion, there is no generalizable gold OA citation advantage at journal level.