Open access journals and subscription journals have equal scientific impact

A survey published in BMC Medicine, the flagship journal of Biomed Central who publish open access papers on science, technology and medicine, has concluded that open access journals now have the same scientific impact as subscription journals. It was carried out by Bo-Christer Björk from the Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland, and David Solomon from the College of Human Medicine, Michigan State University, USA, who based their work on journals that are indexed in Web of Science or Scopus in a study that is "the most comprehensive to date."

The impact factors of 610 OA journals were compared with those of 7,609 subscription journals in Web of Science and an overlapping set of 1,327 OA journals were compared with 11,124 subscription journals using Scopus. The initial results suggested that citation rates for subscription journals were about 30% greater than for OA journals, but this advantage disappeared when certain weighting factors were taken into account. These factors included the subject area, the age of the journal and the location of the publisher.

"Newly founded full OA journals compete on almost equal terms with subscription journals founded in the same period. OA articles published on medicine and health by publishers in the four largest publishing countries attract equal numbers of citations compared to subscription journals in these fields," say Björk and Solomon.

These results will add weight to the ongoing debate about the value of publishing in an OA journal. "There is no reason for authors not to choose to publish in OA journals just because of the 'OA' label, as long as they carefully check the quality standards of the journal they consider," they conclude.