Abstract
In recent years, increased stakeholder pressure to transition research to
Open Access has led to many journals "flipping" from a toll access to an open
access publishing model. Changing the publishing model can influence the
decision of authors to submit their papers to a journal, and increased article
accessibility may influence citation behaviour. The aim of this paper is to
show changes in the number of published articles and citations after the
flipping of a journal. We analysed a set of 171 journals in the Web of Science
(WoS) which flipped to open access. In addition to comparing the number of
articles, average relative citation (ARC) and normalized impact factor (IF) are
applied, respectively, as bibliometric indicators at the article and journal
level, to trace the transformation of flipped journals covered. Our results
show that flipping mostly has had positive effects on journal's IF. But it has
had no obvious citation advantage for the articles. We also see a decline in
the number of published articles after flipping. We can conclude that flipping
to open access can improve the performance of journals, despite decreasing the
tendency of authors to submit their articles and no better citation advantages
for articles.
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