What difference does open access make to your publications? Using articles from Molecular Ecology 2014-2016 I wanted to see if open access papers got more attention. Molecular Ecology is a traditional pay for access journal but authors can pay to make their paper open access. In the graph: paywalled papers are in red and open access ones in blue. Click the black boxes to change the axes.
Open access: the author pays to publish their article and everybody gets to enjoy the science for free. When you're trying to read a journal your university doesn't subscribe to you really start to appreciate open access. Also open access allows wider involvement in science and public return for public funding etc.
But if you're a scientist, and hypothetically there were lots of funding cuts in universities, and perhaps your country had just -exited somesort of union which provided masses of funding for science; Then you might want to spend your research funds on something that will give you a measurable return to further your career. Is open access that something?
Maybe. With open access more people can read your papers which could lead to more citations. Or perhaps in the new age of Altmetrics more potential readers would lead to more tweets or more journalists being able to access and write news articles and blog posts about your work.
Citations are the currency of scientific achievement, it's how you're rated as a scientist really. The obvious thing here is that very recent articles have fewer citations, which makes sense because the older a paper is the more time it's had to get cited.
From the graph alone it's not clear if open access is making any difference. But red is more dense at the bottom whereas blue is evenly spaced. That and some behind the scenes stats suggest that open access articles are cited slightly more. That's interesting but I'm not going to suggest its causal, maybe people are only making their best papers open access.
I expected that if open access made a difference then it would be to Altmetrics. But it seems that there's no impact of open access on Altmetrics. I asked my science journalist buddy John about this. Apparently most science journalism is written from a mixture of abstracts and interviews. Reporters will also get told about what's going to be published, by sites like this, so they have time to write about it before hand.
I'm probably going to write a separate piece about this but it looks as though citations and Altmetrics measure very different things. At least for Molecular Ecology.