Skip to main content
Log in

Different open access routes, varying societal impacts: evidence from the Royal Society biological journals

  • Published:
Scientometrics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Compared to academic impacts (e.g., the citation advancement) brought by Open Access (OA), societal impacts of scientific studies have not been well elaborated in prior studies. In this article, we explore different OA routes (i.e., gold OA, hybrid OA, and bronze OA) and their varying effects on multiple types of societal impacts (i.e., social media and web) by using the case of four biological journals founded by the Royal Society. The results show that (1) gold OA is significantly and positively related to social media indicators (Twitter counts and Facebook counts), but significantly and negatively associated with web indicators (Blog counts and News counts); (2) hybrid OA has a significant and positive effect on both social media and web indicators; and (3) bronze OA is significantly and positively associated with social media indicators, but it turns to be negative albeit nonsignificant for web indicators. The findings suggest that OA policies could increase the societal impact on the public by varying degrees. Specifically, OA policies could amplify the societal impacts of research articles on social media, but the effects are inconsistent for societal impacts on the web.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. See: https://doaj.org/.

  2. See: https://www.coalition-s.org/about/.

  3. See: https://royalsociety.org/journals/open-access/free-content/.

References

  • Alkhawtani, R. H. M., Kwee, T. C., & Kwee, R. M. (2020). Citation advantage for open access articles in European Radiology. European Radiology, 30(1), 482–486.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • AlRyalat, S. A., Saleh, M., Alaqraa, M., Alfukaha, A., Alkayed, Y., Abaza, M., Saa, H. A., & Alshamiry, M. (2019). The impact of the open-access status on journal indices: A review of medical journals. F1000 Research, 8, 266.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • AlRyalat, S. A., Nassar, A. A., Tamimi, F., Al-Fraihat, E., Assaf, L., Ghareeb, R., & Al-Essa, M. (2019b). The impact of the open-access status on journal indices: Oncology journals. Journal of Gastrointestinal Oncology, 10(4), 777–782.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Antelman, K. (2004). Do open access articles have a greater research impact? College and Research Libraries, 65(2), 372–382.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Armstrong, M. (2021). Plan S: An economist’s perspective. Managerial and Decision Economics, 42(2), 2017–2026.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Aung, H. H., Zheng, H., Erdt, M., Aw, A. S., Sin, S. C. J., & Theng, Y. L. (2019). Investigating familiarity and usage of traditional metrics and altmetrics. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 70(8), 872–887.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bar-Ilan, J., Shema, H., & Thelwall, M. (2014). Bibliographic references in web 2.0. In B. Cronin & C. R. Sugimoto (Eds.), Beyond bibliometrics: Harnessingmulti-dimensional indicators of performance (pp. 307–325). MIT Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Basson, I., Blanckenberg, J. P., & Prozesky, H. (2021). Do open access journal articles experience a citation advantage? Results and methodological reflections of an application of multiple measures to an analysis by WoS subject areas. Scientometrics, 126(1), 459–484.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bautista-Puig, N., Lopez-Illescas, C., de Moya-Anegon, F., Guerrero-Bote, V., & Moed, H. F. (2020). Scientometrics, 124(3), 2551–2575.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bik, H. M., & Goldstein, M. C. (2013). An introduction to social media for scientists. PLoS Biology, 11(4), e1001535.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Björk, B. C. (2017). Growth of hybrid open access, 2009–2016. PeerJ, 5, e3878.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bonetta, L. (2007). Scientists enter the blogosphere. Cell, 129(3), 443–445.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bornmann, L. (2014). Is there currently a scientific revolution in scientometrics? Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 65(3), 647–648.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bornmann, L. (2014). Validity of altmetrics data for measuring societal impact: A study using data from Altmetric and F1000Prime. Journal of Informetrics, 8(4), 935–950.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bornmann, L. (2013). What is societal impact of research and how can it be assessed? A literature survey. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 64(2), 217–233.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bornmann, L. (2016). Scientific revolution in scientometrics: The broadening of impact from citation to societal. In C. R. Sugimoto (Ed.), Theories of informetrics and scholarly communication (pp. 347–359). De Gruyter.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brainard, J. (2021). Open access takes flight. Science, 371(6524), 16–17.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Brody, T., Stamerjohanns, H., Harnad, S. Gingras, Y. Vallieres, F., & Oppenheim, C. (2004). The effect of Open Access on Citation Impact. Presented at: National Policies on Open Access (OA). Provision for University Research Output: An International meeting. Southampton University, Southampton UK. Retrieved February 19, 2004, from http://opcit.eprints.org/feb19oa/brody-impact.pdf

  • Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI). (2002). Read the Budapest Open Access Initiative. Retrieved August 17, 2021, from https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read

  • Butler, D. (2017). Gates Foundation announces open-access publishing venture. Nature, 543(7647), 599–599.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chen, B. K., Custis, T., Monteggia, L. M., & George, T. P. (2024). Effects of open access publishing on article metrics in Neuropsychopharmacology. Neuropsychopharmacology, 49, 757–763.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Clayson, P. E., Baldwin, S. A., & Larson, M. J. (2021). The open access advantage for studies of human electrophysiology: Impact on citations and Altmetrics. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 164(2021), 103–111.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Costas, R., Zahedi, Z., & Wouters, P. (2015). Do “altmetrics” correlate with citations? Extensive comparison of altmetric indicators with citations from a multidisciplinary perspective. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 66(10), 2003–2019.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Craig, I. D., Plume, A. M., McVeigh, M. E., Pringle, J., & Amin, M. (2007). Do open access articles have greater citation impact? Journal of Informetrics, 1(3), 239–248.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Davis, P. M. (2011). Open access, readership, citations: A randomized controlled trial of scientific journal publishing. FASEB Journal, 25(7), 2129–2134.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Davis, P. M., & Walters, W. H. (2011). The impact of free access to the scientific literature: A review of recent research. Journal of the Medical Library Association, 99(3), 208–217.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Didegah, F., Bowman, T. D., & Holmberg, K. (2018). On the differences between citations and altmetrics: An investigation of factors driving altmetrics versus citations for finnish articles. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 69(6), 832–843.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dorta-González, P., & Santana-Jiménez, Y. (2018). Prevalence and citation advantage of gold open access in the subject areas of the Scopus database. Research Evolution, 27(1), 1–15.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Eysenbach, G. (2006). Citation advantage of open access articles. PLoS Biology, 4(5), 692–698.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gargouri, Y., Hajjem, C., Larivière, V., Gingras, Y., Carr, L., Brody, T., et al. (2010). Self-selected or mandated, open access increases citation impact for higher quality research. PLoS One, 5(10), e13636.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gaule, P., & Maystre, N. (2011). Getting cited: Does open access help? Research Policy, 40(10), 1332–1338.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ghane, M. R., Niazmand, M. R., & Sarvestani, A. S. (2020). The citation advantage for open access science journals with and without article processing charges. Journal of Information Science, 46(1), 118–130.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gold, E. R. (2021). The fall of the innovation empire and its possible rise through open science. Research Policy. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2021.104226

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Graham, A. (2024). An Open Access Odyssey. Retrieved March 10, 2024, from https://royalsociety.org/blog/2024/03/open-access-2023/

  • Hafeez, D. M., Jalal, S., & Khosa, F. (2019). Bibliometric analysis of manuscript characteristics that influence citations: A comparison of six major psychiatry journals. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 108, 90–94.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallières, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y., Oppenheim, C., Hajjem, C., & Hilf, E. R. (2008). The access/impact problem and the green and gold roads to open access: An update. Serials Review, 34(1), 36–40.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Haustein, S., Costas, R., & Larivière, V. (2015). Characterizing social media metrics of scholarly papers: The effect of document properties and collaboration patterns. PLoS One, 10(3), e0120495.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Holmberg, K., Bowman, S., Bowman, T., Didegah, F., & Kortelainen, T. (2019). What is societal impact and where do altmetrics fit into the equation? Journal of Altmetrics. https://doi.org/10.29024/joa.21

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hua, F., Sun, H., Walsh, T., Worthington, H., & Glenny, A.-M. (2016). Open access to journal articles in dentistry: Prevalence and citation impact. Journal of Dentistry, 47, 41–48.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hunter, K. (2005). Critical issues in the development of STM journal publishing. Learned Publishing, 18(1), 51–55.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kousha, K., & Thelwall, M. (2019). An automatic method to identify citations to journals in news stories: A case study of the UK newspapers citing Web of Science journals. Journal of Data and Information Science, 4(3), 73–95.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kurtz, M. J., Eichhorn, G., Accomazzi, A., Grant, C., Demleitner, M., Henneken, E., & Murray, S. S. (2005). The effect of use and access on citations. Information Processing and Management, 41(6), 1395–1402.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Laakso, M., & Björk, B. C. (2013). Delayed open access: An overlooked high-impact category of openly available scientific literature. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 64(7), 1323–1329.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Laakso, M., & Björk, B. C. (2016). Hybrid open access-a longitudinal study. Journal of Informetrics, 10(4), 919–932.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Langham-Putrow, A., Bakker, C., & Riegelman, A. (2021). Is the open access citation advantage real? A systematic review of the citation of open access and subscription-based articles. PLoS ONE, 16(6), e0253129.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lawrence, S. (2001). Free online availability substantially increases a paper’s impact. Nature, 411(6837), 521–521.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lee, J. J., & Haupt, J. P. (2021). Scientific globalism during a global crisis: Research collaboration and open access publications on COVID-19. Higher Education, 81(5), 949–966.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lin, W. Y. C. (2021). Effects of open access and articles-in-press mechanisms on publishing lag and first-citation speed: A case on energy and fuels journals. Scientometrics, 126(6), 4841–4869.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McCabe, M., & Snyder, C. (2014). Identifying the effect of open access on citations using a panel of science journals. Economic Inquiry, 52(4), 1284–1300.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McKiernan, E., Bourne, P., Brown, C., Buck, S., Kenall, A., LinMcDougall, J. D., Nosek, B. A., Ram, K., Soderberg, C. K., Spies, J. R., Thaney, K., Updegrove, A., Woo, K. H., & Yarkoni, T. (2016). How open science helps researchers succeed. eLife, 5, e16800.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mering, M., & Hoeve, C. D. (2020). A brief history to the future of open access. Serials Review, 46(4), 300–304.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Moed, H. F. (2007). The effect of “open access” on citation impact: An analysis of ArXiv’s condensed matter section. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(13), 2047–2054.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mohammadi, E., Barahmand, N., & Thelwall, M. (2020). Who shares health and medical scholarly articles on facebook? Learned Publishing, 33(2), 111–118.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mohammadi, E., Thelwall, M., Kwasny, M., & Holmes, K. (2018). Academic information on Twitter: A user survey. PLoS ONE, 13(5), e0197265.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Momeni, F., Mayr, P., Fraser, N., & Peters, I. (2021). What happens when a journal converts to open access? A Bibliometric Analysis. Scientometrics, 126(12), 9811–9827.

    Google Scholar 

  • Morillo, F. (2020). Is open access publication useful for all research fields? Presence of funding, collaboration and impact. Scientometrics, 125(1), 689–716.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mueller-Langer, F., Scheufen, M., & Waelbroeck, P. (2020). Does online access promote research in developing countries? Empirical evidence from article-level data: Research Policy. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2019.103886

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Nelson, G. M., & Eggett, D. L. (2017). Citations, mandates, and money: Author motivations to publish in chemistry hybrid open access journals. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 68(10), 2501–2510.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Norris, M., Oppenheim, C., & Rowland, F. (2008). The citation advantage of open-access articles. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59(12), 1963–1972.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ortega, J. L. (2019). Availability and audit of links in altmetric data providers: Link checking of blogs and news in Altmetric.com, Crossref Event Data and PlumX. Journal of Altmetrics, 2(1), 4. https://doi.org/10.29024/joa.14

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Patel, R. B., Vaduganathan, M., Mosarla, R. C., Venkateswaran, R. V., Bhatt, D. L., & Bonow, R. O. (2019). Open access publishing and subsequent citations among articles in major cardiovascular journals. American of Medicine, 132(9), 1103–1105.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Piwowar, H., Priem, J., Lariviere, V., Alperin, J. P., Matthias, L., Norlander, B., et al. (2018). The state of OA: A large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles. PeerJ, 6, e4375.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Plume, A. (2024). Open-access publishing: Citation advantage is unproven. Nature, 626(7999), 480–480.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Priem, J. (2014). Altmetrics. In B. Cronin & C. R. Sugimoto (Eds.), Beyond bibliometrics: Harnessing multi-dimensional indicators of performance (pp. 263–288). MIT Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Priem, J., Taraborelli, D., Groth, P., & Neylon, C. (2010). Altmetrics: A manifesto. Retrieved July 22, 2022, from http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/

  • Rodrigues, R. S., Abadal, E., & de Araujo, B. K. H. (2020). Open access publishers: The new players. PLoS ONE, 15(6), e0233432.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shema, H., Bar-Ilan, J., & Thelwall, M. (2014). Do blog citations correlate with a higher number of future citations? Research blogs as a potential source for alternative metrics. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 65(5), 1018–1027.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shema, H., Bar-Ilan, J., & Thelwall, M. (2015). How is research blogged? A content analysis approach. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 66(6), 1136–1149.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sotudeh, H., Arabzadeh, H., & Mirzabeigi, M. (2019). How do self-archiving and Author-pays models associate and contribute to OA citation advantage within hybrid journals. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 45(4), 377–385.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • 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.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stuart, T. (2017). The Rise of Open Access. Retrieved July 30, 2023, from https://royalsociety.org/blog/2017/10/the-rise-of-open-access/

  • Stuart, T. (2023). The Road to Open Access. Retrieved March 10, 2024, from https://royalsociety.org/blog/2023/09/the-road-to-open-access/

  • Sugimoto, C. R., Work, S., Larivière, V., & Haustein, S. (2017). Scholarly use of social media and altmetrics: A review of the literature. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 68(9), 2037–2062.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Taylor, M. (2020). An altmetric attention advantage for open access books in the humanities and social sciences. Scientometrics, 125(3), 2523–2543.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Thelwall, M., & Kousha, K. (2015). Web indicators for research evaluation. Part 2: Social media metrics. Profesional De La Informacion, 24(5), 607–620.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Thelwall, M. (2021). Measuring societal impacts of research with altmetrics? Common problems and mistakes. Journal of Economic Surveys, 35(5), 1302–1314.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Thelwall, M., Tsou, A., Weingart, S., Holmberg, K., & Haustein, S. (2013). Tweeting links to academic articles. Cybermetrics: International Journal of Scientometrics Informetrics and Bibliometrics, 17, 1–8.

    Google Scholar 

  • Torres-Salinas, D. (2020). Daily growth rate of scientific production on Covid-19. Analysis in databases and open access repositories. Profesional de la informacion, 29(2), e290215.

    Google Scholar 

  • Turgut, Y. E., Aslan, A., & Denizalp, N. V. (2021). Academicians’ awareness, attitude, and use of open access during the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/09610006211016509

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wang, X., Liu, C., Mao, W., & Fang, Z. (2015). The open access advantage considering citation, article usage and social media attention. Scientometrics, 103(2), 555–564.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wray, K. B. (2016). No new evidence for a citation benefit for Author-Pay Open Access Publications in the social sciences and humanities. Scientometrics, 103(3), 1031–1035.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wren, J. D. (2005). Open access and openly accessible: A study of scientific publications shared via the internet. British Medical Journal, 330(7500), 1128–1131.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Yi, H., Leng, Q. H., Zhou, J., Peng, S. F., & Mao, Y. S. (2023). Do open access articles have a citation advantage in Journal of Hepatology? Journal of Hepatology, 79(2), E71–E73.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Young, J. S., & Brandes, P. M. (2020). Green and gold open access citation and interdisciplinary advantage: A bibliometric study of two science journals. Journal of Academic Librarianship. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2019.102105

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zhang, L. W., & Wang, J. (2018). Why highly cited articles are not highly tweeted? A Biology Case. Scientometrics, 117(1), 495–509.

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Zhang, L. W., & Wang, J. (2021). What affects publications’ popularity on Twitter? Scientometrics, 126(11), 9185–9198.

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Zhang, L., & Watson, E. M. (2017). Measuring the impact of gold and green open access. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 43(4), 337–345.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

We thank altmetric.com for sharing the data used in this study.

Funding

Financial support is from Beijing Social Science Fund (No. 21DTR058), National Social Science Fund of China (20&ZD071; 23&ZD080), and National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 72274203, No. 72241434).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Liang Ma.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

There is no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Zhang, L., Ma, L. Different open access routes, varying societal impacts: evidence from the Royal Society biological journals. Scientometrics 129, 3407–3431 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-05032-0

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-05032-0

Keywords

Navigation