What does open access publication buy you?

Eric Jardine

I recently published an article in Chatham House’s Journal of Cyber Policy. My article, entitled ‘Mind the denominator: towards a more effective measurement system for cybersecurity’ (3: 1, 2018), reflects my deep and abiding interest in measuring things. Metric fixation, absent context, impressions and gut instinct can be problematic, but getting a sense of the numbers often reveals a lot about how social phenomena shake out in practice.

Once my article was accepted, I was faced with the hard choice of deciding if I should fork out funds to have the article available open access — a service that Taylor and Francis provides at a hefty price tag of US$3,000. While my institution, Virginia Tech, provides a subsidy to help cover at least part of the cost if a journal falls on a pre-specified list, Journal of Cyber Policy is currently not on the list. As a result, I was facing a scenario of paying for open access for my article through my own research funds. Funds which, I wondered, might be of more use elsewhere.

The big question for me was simple: is open access worth it? The question was particularly acute in the case of the Journal of Cyber Policy. The outlet is new, with its first issue hitting the proverbial shelves in 2016. The relative newness of the journal implies, everything else being equal, a smaller circulation and, therefore, fewer readers as interested parties face paywalls and the prospect of Interlibrary Loans.

Faced with a trade-off between a potential US$3,000 bill or more limited circulation, I opted to collect some numbers. I collected the metrics available on the Journal of Cyber Policy’s website and added citation rates from Google Scholar. In total, I got access to information on views per article, CrossRef citations, Google Scholar citations and Altmetrics. I wanted to dig down and see if, as I suspected, open access was a multiplier.

My first step was to look at the averages across each indicator for closed vs open access publications. Table 1 summarizes these results. As expected, across the whole suite of available articles (excluding miscellany, editorials, interviews, etc.), open access publishing provided a huge multiplier effect. The effect was particularly pronounced in terms of views, as open access publications were, on average, likely to have up to 17.54 times more views. The second highest multiplier, which likely follows in some measure from the first, was for Google Scholar citations, where open access articles tended to get cited an average of 4.6 times more.

The argument in favour of open access was starting to look pretty clear. Yet I was also curious about what the multiplier does over time. For instance, does publishing open access lead to a burst of views and citations, but then flatten out over the longer term? While the data only runs for slightly over a year (1: 1, 2016 to 2: 2, 2017), I was able to get a sense of the change in the multiplier as a function of time. Table 2 presents these results below.

The interesting thing to be observed here is that there does appear to be some, admittedly limited, evidence to suggest that the multiplier effect is affected by age. However, the multiplier effect of open access actually tends to increase with age, not decrease. For instance, the open access to closed access views multiplier is 28.53, the average Altmetric multiplier is 6.54 and the Google Scholar citation multiplier is 5.29 for the oldest issue (2: 2, 2017) of the Journal of Cyber Policy. In contrast, the multipliers for these same metrics for the newer issue (1: 1, 2016) are less pronounced: views for open access articles are multiplied by only 26.56, the average alternative metrics multiplier is only 1.34 and average Google scholar citations come in at 2.25. These numbers suggest that the multiplier effect tends to grow over time.

Clearly, total citations is a strong function of more views. While the practice not mentioned in polite company of citing articles from just their abstract would lead to some citations for all, the open access numbers show overwhelmingly that garnering more citations (one form of academic capital) is a function of more people actually seeing your work. However, a rough eyeball of the numbers suggested that the relative performance of open access vs closed access publications was not as cut and dry. Just as I show in my article published in the Journal of Cyber Policy, ignoring the denominator when measuring cybersecurity trends leads to biased impressions about the scope of insecurity in cyberspace. Similarly, the relative performance of open access vs closed access articles may be usefully expressed as a rate per 100 views.

Interestingly, the direction of the multiplier effect flips once citations are expressed as a rate per 100 views. Rather than open access publications performing better (as they do with total citations), closed access articles tend to have a better rate of citations per 100 views. For example, over all the published original articles in the Journal of Cyber Policy, those that are closed access have been cited 3.82 times more per 100 views than those that are open access using Google Scholar citations and 8.35 times more per 100 views using the more restrictive CrossRef citation count. This outcome makes a certain amount of sense, as it likely means that open access publications are viewed by more casual observers and people who are not academics — and thus do not have access to an institutional subscription for the Journal of Cyber Policy. Open access results in more views overall and has higher overall citation counts, but, when looking at the amount of citations per views, closed access appears to perform better.

This last result gave me some hope. In the era of Google Scholar searches and too little time, closed access articles — at least those published in the Journal of Cyber Policy — perform well given how many times they are viewed. This illustrates that open access does not have a monopoly on quality or impact and that if you cannot afford open access, you can still build up citations and your career with traditional closed access publication. Every person clearly needs to make the choice for themselves and knowing the advantages of each via the numbers is, I think, helpful for all.


Eric Jardine is Assistant Professor in Political Science at Virginia Tech and Research Fellow in CIGI’s Global Security & Politics Program .

His article in the Journal of Cyber Policy is titled ‘Mind the denominator: towards a more effective measurement system for cybersecurity’.

Read the article online here.

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