Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research. Gargouri Y, Hajjem C, Larivière V, Gingras Y, Carr L, Brody T, Harnad S. PLoS ONE. 2010;5(10):e13636+. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013636.
“Articles whose authors have supplemented subscription-based access to the publisher’s version by self-archiving their own final draft to make it accessible free for all on the web (Open Access, OA) are cited significantly more than articles in the same journal and year that have not been made OA. Some have suggested that this OA Advantage may not be causal but just a self-selection bias, because authors preferentially make higher-quality articles OA. To test this we compared self-selective self-archiving with mandatory self-archiving for a sample of 27,197 articles published 20022006 in 1,984 journals…The OA advantage is greater for the more citable articles, not because of a quality bias from authors self-selecting what to make OA, but because of a quality advantage, from users self-selecting what to use and cite, freed by OA from the constraints of selective accessibility to subscribers only. It is hoped that these findings will help motivate the adoption of OA self-archiving mandates by universities, research institutions and research funders.”
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