Impact on Citations and Altmetrics Peter E. Clayson*1, Scott
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1 The Open Access Advantage for Studies of Human Electrophysiology: Impact on Citations and Altmetrics Peter E. Clayson*1, Scott A. Baldwin2, and Michael J. Larson2,3 1Department of Psychology, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 2Department of Psychology, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 3Neuroscience Center, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT *Corresponding author at: Department of Psychology, University of South Florida, 4202 East Fowler Avenue, Tampa, FL, US, 33620-7200. Email: [email protected] 2 Disclosure Michael J. Larson, PhD, is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Psychophysiology. Editing of the manuscript was handled by a separate editor and Dr. Larson was blinded from viewing the reviews or comments as well as the identities of the reviewers. 3 Abstract Barriers to accessing scientific findings contribute to knowledge inequalities based on financial resources and decrease the transparency and rigor of scientific research. Recent initiatives aim to improve access to research as well as methodological rigor via transparency and openness. We sought to determine the impact of such initiatives on open access publishing in the sub-area of human electrophysiology and the impact of open access on the attention articles received in the scholarly literature and other outlets. Data for 35,144 articles across 967 journals from the last 20 years were examined. Approximately 35% of articles were open access, and the rate of publication of open-access articles increased over time. Open access articles showed 9 to 21% more PubMed and CrossRef citations and 39% more Altmetric mentions than closed access articles. Green open access articles (i.e., author archived) did not differ from non-green open access articles (i.e., publisher archived) with respect to citations and were related to higher Altmetric mentions. These findings demonstrate that open-access publishing is increasing in popularity in the sub-area of human electrophysiology and that open-access articles enjoy the “open access advantage” in citations similar to the larger scientific literature. The benefit of the open access advantage may motivate researchers to make their publications open access and pursue publication outlets that support it. In consideration of the direct connection between citations and journal impact factor, journal editors may improve the accessibility and impact of published articles by encouraging authors to self-archive manuscripts on preprint servers. Keywords: open access, citation advantage, human electrophysiology (EEG), event-related potentials (ERPs), preprints 4 Open and rigorous scientific practices are increasingly applied throughout the scientific community. These practices include methodological transparency, openly available data, pre- registration of studies, replication of prominent effects, and open access publications. The shift to open and transparent science is part of a concerted effort to improve the rigor, validity, replicability, and availability of research (Nosek & Bar-Anan, 2012; Nosek & Lakens, 2014). Newfound availability of data and methodology repositories such as the Open Science Framework (OSF), Zenodo, or Databrary (see Gilmore, Kennedy, & Adolph, 2018), and preprint servers such as the ArXiv portfolio provide mechanisms for scientists to make their work accessible. The number of scientists posting their data and code and making their manuscripts available via preprints or other open access formats is increasing (e.g., Hardwicke et al., 2018; Laakso et al., 2011). Specific scientific areas are raising their focus on access to open and rigorous scientific practices. For example, two flagship journals of international societies in psychophysiology, the International Journal of Psychophysiology and Psychophysiology, offer the registered reports format (along with over 250 total journals and growing; see https://www.cos.io/initiatives/registered-reports), and journals within neuroscience and psychology, such as the highly-cited journals Nature Communications, NeuroImage, and Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Sciences, have shifted to only open-access formats. The Budapest Open Access Initiative was among the first to call for increases in self- archiving of manuscripts and availability of open access journals in 2001 as part of an effort to reduce barriers to accessing scholarly works (https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/). Similarly, funding agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States or Wellcome Trust in the United Kingdom, require open-access posting of funded studies—often 5 after an embargo period, such as on PubMed Commons for those that receive NIH funding. Mandating open access is associated with increased rates of manuscript availability as well as increased article impact (Gargouri et al., 2010; Vincent-Lamarre, Boivin, Gargouri, Larivière, & Harnad, 2015). Approximately 28% of the scholarly literature is currently considered open access (Piwowar et al., 2018)—although these numbers may be an underestimate as multiple publishers increased their open access inventory during the COVID-19 pandemic (Grove, 2020). Specific sub-areas of science, such as clinical neuroscience, report open access rates as high as 49% (Hanson, Almeida, Traylor, Rajagopalan, & Johnson, 2020). In addition, most publishers now have provisions within their copyright policies for authors to post preprints and/or final non- copy edited and formatted drafts (sometimes referred to as post-prints). Despite the increase in availability and use of open access formats, there are costs associated with the production and publication of research. Digital space for hosting repositories, web interfaces for manuscript submission and review, typesetting and copy editing, and printing and distribution charges are some of the costs that make open-access publication cost-ineffective for publishers. In the absence of a subscription base to cover these costs in open access journals (or for open access articles), publishers often use digital-only formats or include article processing charges for open access articles that range from reasonable to exorbitant (over $5,000 United States dollars for some journals). Article processing charges may disproportionately affect researchers from countries with lower currency exchange rates (Dove, Chan, Thoma, Roland, & Bruijns, 2019). Article processing charges shift the burden from institutions or library systems to individual authors and can, problematically, restrict open access publishing to those with grant funding or other financial means. Due to these article processing charges, grant- funded research that is vetted by funding agency reviewers prior to study initiation may be more 6 likely to be fully open access—potentially influencing the quality and perception of open access research. In light of these article processing charges and motivations to increase accessibility to published research, most publishers employ “tiers” of open access with different corresponding fee structures. In gold open access, typically the costliest form of open access, the manuscript is made available by the publisher and is freely available on journal or publisher websites and through search engines. Green open access, in contrast, refers to free or low-cost self-archiving of manuscripts wherein authors upload preprints or post-prints of the work or the article is made available through personal homepages or institutional repositories (see Laakso et al., 2011). Many journals implement a hybrid model wherein they publish a mix of gold open access and closed access articles. An additional level of open access is diamond or platinum where the papers are archived by the publisher, but the payment for the open access article status is made by the sale of advertising, grant funding, institutions, or governments. For the purposes of the current paper, we separate author-archived green open access from other “non-green” forms of open access that are typically publisher-archived and done at a cost (including gold, diamond, or platinum open access levels). One particular benefit of open access publishing is increased exposure and citation counts—sometimes referred to as the “open access citation advantage”. Citation counts are often used as a proxy for the scientific impact an article has on the academic literature. Compared to closed-access articles, manuscripts published in an open access format showed high citation indices across scientific disciplines; open-access articles receive approximately 18% more citations on average than closed access articles (Piwowar et al., 2018). The trend of increased citation counts for open access articles is also present in specific sub-areas of science such as 7 biology (Eysenbach, 2006), general medicine (AlRyalat, Saleh, et al., 2019), oncology (AlRyalat, Nassar, et al., 2019), cardiovascular disease (Patel et al., 2019), poverty-related disease (Breugelmans et al., 2018), and psychiatry (Hafeez, Jalal, & Khosa, 2019). Moderators of this citation increase at the article level may include impact factor of the journal, specific area of study, and time since publication, with both higher journal impact factor and longer time since publication associated with higher article citation counts independent of open access status (see Piwowar et al., 2018). Social media exposure may also increase article citation rates (Shuai, Pepe, & Bollen, 2012). For example, mentions of articles on Twitter are associated with increased