Purpose: For a set of 1,561 Open Access (OA) and non-OA journals in business and economics, this study evaluates the relationships between four citation metrics—five-year Impact Factor (5IF), CiteScore, Article Influence (AI) score, and SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)—and the journal ratings assigned by expert reviewers. We expect that the OA journals will have especially high citation impact relative to their perceived quality (reputation).

Design/methodology/approach: Regression is used to estimate the ratings assigned by expert reviewers for the 2021 CABS (Chartered Association of Business Schools) journal assessment exercise. The independent variables are the four citation metrics, evaluated separately, and a dummy variable representing the OA/non-OA status of each journal.

Findings: Regardless of the citation metric used, OA journals in business and economics have especially high citation impact relative to their perceived quality (reputation). That is, they have especially low perceived quality (reputation) relative to their citation impact.

Research limitations: These results are specific to the CABS journal ratings and the four citation metrics. However, there is strong evidence that CABS is closely related to several other expert ratings, and that 5IF, CiteScore, AI, and SJR are representative of the other citation metrics that might have been chosen.

Practical implications: There are at least two possible explanations for these results: (1) expert evaluators are biased against OA journals, and (2) OA journals have especially high citation impact due to their increased accessibility. Although this study does not allow us to determine which of these explanations are supported, the results suggest that authors should consider publishing in OA journals whenever overall readership and citation impact are more important than journal reputation within a particular field. Moreover, the OA coefficients provide a useful indicator of the extent to which anti-OA bias (or the citation advantage of OA journals) is diminishing over time.

Originality/value: This is apparently the first study to investigate the impact of OA status on the relationships between expert journal ratings and journal citation metrics.

Purpose: Recently, global science has shown an increasing open trend, however, the characteristics of research integrity of open access (OA) publications have rarely been studied. The aim of this study is to compare the characteristics of retracted articles across different OA levels and discover whether OA level influences the characteristics of retracted articles.

Design/methodology/approach: The research conducted an analysis of 6,005 retracted publications between 2001 and 2020 from the Web of Science and Retraction Watch databases. These publications were categorized based on their OA levels, including Gold OA, Green OA, and non-OA. The study explored retraction rates, time lags and reasons within these categories.

Findings: The findings of this research revealed distinct patterns in retraction rates among different OA levels. Publications with Gold OA demonstrated the highest retraction rate, followed by Green OA and non-OA. A comparison of retraction reasons between Gold OA and non-OA categories indicated similar proportions, while Green OA exhibited a higher proportion due to falsification and manipulation issues, along with a lower occurrence of plagiarism and authorship issues. The retraction time lag was shortest for Gold OA, followed by non-OA, and longest for Green OA. The prolonged retraction time for Green OA could be attributed to an atypical distribution of retraction reasons.

Research limitations: There is no exploration of a wider range of OA levels, such as Hybrid OA and Bronze OA.

Practical implications: The outcomes of this study suggest the need for increased attention to research integrity within the OA publications. The occurrences of falsification, manipulation, and ethical concerns within Green OA publications warrant attention from the scientific community.

Originality/value: This study contributes to the understanding of research integrity in the realm of OA publications, shedding light on retraction patterns and reasons across different OA levels.

Purpose: Researchers are more likely to read and cite papers to which they have access than those that they cannot obtain. Thus, the objective of this work is to analyze the contribution of the Open Access (OA) modality to the impact of hybrid journals.

Design/methodology/approach: The “research articles” in the year 2017 from 200 hybrid journals in four subject areas, and the citations received by such articles in the period 2017-2020 in the Scopus database, were analyzed. The hybrid OA papers were compared with the paywalled ones. The journals were randomly selected from those with share of OA papers higher than some minimal value. More than 60 thousand research articles were analyzed in the sample, of which 24% under the OA modality.

Findings: We obtain at journal level that cites per article in both hybrid modalities (OA and paywalled) strongly correlate. However, there is no correlation between the OA prevalence and cites per article. There is OA citation advantage in 80% of hybrid journals. Moreover, the OA citation advantage is consistent across fields and held in time. We obtain an OA citation advantage of 50% in average, and higher than 37% in half of the hybrid journals. Finally, the OA citation advantage is higher in Humanities than in Science and Social Science.

Research limitations: Some of the citation advantage is likely due to more access allows more people to read and hence cite articles they otherwise would not. However, causation is difficult to establish and there are many possible bias. Several factors can affect the observed differences in citation rates. Funder mandates can be one of them. Funders are likely to have OA requirement, and well-funded studies are more likely to receive more citations than poorly funded studies. Another discussed factor is the selection bias postulate, which suggests that authors choose only their most impactful studies to be open access.

Practical implications: For hybrid journals, the open access modality is positive, in the sense that it provides a greater number of potential readers. This in turn translates into a greater number of citations and an improvement in the position of the journal in the rankings by impact factor. For researchers it is also positive because it increases the potential number of readers and citations received.

Originality/value: Our study refines previous results by comparing documents more similar to each other. Although it does not examine the cause of the observed citation advantage, we find that it exists in a very large sample.

Purpose: The open-access (OA) publishing model can help improve researchers’ outreach, thanks to its accessibility and visibility to the public. Therefore, the presentation of female researchers can benefit from the OA publishing model. Despite that, little is known about how gender affects OA practices. Thus, the current study explores the effects of female involvement and risk aversion on OA publishing patterns among Vietnamese social sciences and humanities.
Design/methodology/approach: The study employed Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) on a dataset of 3,122 Vietnamese social sciences and humanities (SS&H) publications during 2008-2019. The Mindsponge mechanism was specifically used to construct theoretical models, while Bayesian inference was utilized for fitting models.
Findings: The result showed a positive association between female participation and OA publishing probability. However, the positive effect of female involvement on OA publishing probability was negated by the high ratio of female researchers in a publication. OA status was negatively associated with the JIF of the journal in which the publication was published, but the relationship was moderated by the involvement of a female researcher(s). The findings suggested that Vietnamese female researchers might be more likely to publish under the OA model in journals with high JIF for avoiding the risk of public criticism.
Research limitations: The study could only provide evidence on the association between female involvement and OA publishing probability. However, whether to publish under OA terms is often determined by the first or corresponding authors, but not necessarily gender-based.
Practical implications: Systematically coordinated actions are suggested to better support women and promote the OA movement in Vietnam.
Originality/value: The findings show the OA publishing patterns of female researchers in Vietnamese SS&H.