BIBLIOMETRIC AND BENCHMARK ANALYSIS OF GOLD OPEN ACCESS IN SPAIN: BIG OUTPUT AND LITTLE IMPACT Análisis bibliométrico y comparativo de la ruta dorada del acceso abierto en España: mucha producción y poco impacto Daniel Torres-Salinas, Nicolás Robinson-García, and Isidro F. Aguillo Daniel Torres-Salinas holds a PhD in scientific documentation. He currently works as bibliometri- cian at the University of Granada and the University of Navarra. He is researcher in EC3 Research Group (Evaluación de la Ciencia y de la Comunicación Científica), CEO of the EC3metrics spin-off and coordinator of the Digital Science Section in Medialab UGR. He is co-author of evaluation tools such as Científicacvn, Rankings I-UGR de Universidades, Clasificación Integrada de Revistas Cientí- ficas (CIRC), Bipublishers, and UGRinvestiga. He teaches courses on scholarly communication, web 2.0 and science, and research services for libraries. http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8790-3314 Universidad de Navarra y Universidad de Granada (EC3metrics y Medialab UGR) CTTGran Vía, 48. 18010 Granada, Spain [email protected] Nicolás Robinson-García holds a PhD in social sciences from the University of Granada. He is a postdoctoral researcher in the field of bibliometrics and is interested on research evaluation at the institutional level, the evaluation of monographs, and the study of new data sources for- bi bliometric analysis. He is currently working at Ingenio (CSIC-UPV) at the Universitat Politècnica de València as a Juan de la Cierva Posdoctoral Research Fellow. http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0585-7359 Ingenio (CSIC-UPV), Universitat Politècnica de València Camino de Vera s/n, 46022 Valencia, España [email protected] Isidro F. Aguillo is head of the Cybermetrics Laboratory at the Instituto de Políticas y Bienes Públi- cos (IPP) from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). He is editor of the journal Cyberme- trics, first born-digital journal fromCSIC ; and of the Ranking Web of Universities, Research Centers, Hospitals, and Repositories. He has published more than 200 papers on cybermetrics, research evaluation, web indicators, and electronic journals. He has a bachelor degree on biology from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and a masters on information science from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8927-4873 CSIC, Instituto de Políticas y Bienes Públicos, Laboratorio de Cibermetría Albasanz, 26-28. 28037 Madrid, Spain [email protected] Abstract This bibliometric study analyzes the research output produced by Spain during the 2005-2014 time period in Open Access (OA) journals indexed in Web of Science. The aim of the paper is to determine if papers published in Open Access journals contribute to the improvement of citation impact and collaboration indicators in Spanish research. The results are shown by scientific areas and compared with 17 European countries. Spain is the second highest ranking European country with gold OA publication output and the fourth highest in Open Access output (9%). In Spain OA output is especially high in the fields of Arts and Humanities (28%). Spain’s normalized citation impact in Open access (0.72) is lower than the world average and Manuscript received on 10-09-2015 Accepted on 26-11-2015 El profesional de la información, 2016, enero-febrero, v. 25, n. 1. eISSN: 1699-2407 17 Daniel Torres-Salinas, Nicolás Robinson-García, and Isidro F. Aguillo that of the main European countries. Finally, we discuss how these results differ from the so-called Open Access citation advantage. Keywords Open Access; Gold road; Web of Science; Análisis bibliométrico; Research impact; International collaboration; Spain; Europe. Resumen Estudio bibliométrico que analiza la contribución de los científicos españoles a las revistas en acceso abierto indexadas en la Web of Science durante 2005-2014. El objetivo es determinar si la publicación en revistas en acceso abierto contribuye a mejorar los indicadores bibliométricos de impacto y colaboración de la ciencia española. Los resultados se presentan por áreas científicas y se comparan con un conjunto de 17 países europeos. Los resultados establecen que España es el segundo país europeo con un mayor porcentaje trabajos en acceso abierto (9%), especialmente en Arte y Humanidades (28%). Se establece como la citación normalizada (0,72) de la producción en acceso abierto está por debajo de la media mundial y de los valores de las principales potencias europeas. Finalmente se discute como los resultados entran en contradicción con la denominada ventaja de citación del acceso abierto. Palabras clave Acceso abierto; Ruta dorada; Web of Science; Bibliometric analysis Impacto científico; Colaboración internacional; España; Europa. Torres-Salinas, Daniel; Robinson-García, Nicolás; Aguillo, Isidro F. (2016). “Bibliometric and benchmark analysis of gold open access in Spain: big output and little impact”. El profesional de la información, v. 25, n. 1, pp. 17-24. http://dx.doi.org/10.3145/epi.2016.ene.03 1. Introduction port the gold road, OA advocates have strongly promoted self-archiving (green road) and the use of institutional and The Open Access movement has its roots in two different thematic repositories (Harnad, 2007). In this sense, most of initiatives. First, the proposal led by the physicist Paul Gins- the studies analyzing the citation advantage of OA are fo- parg (1994) for exchanging pre-prints and the launch of the cused on green OA and not on OA journals (Swan, 2010). arXiv pioneer repository . Second, the response of the re- The publication of gold OA is full of controversy because of search community to the so-called ‘serial crisis’ (Odlyzko, the APC business model imposed by many of these journals, 1995); when the price of journal subscriptions for academic and because of the emergence of predatory journals which libraries increased in such a substantial way that it threa- have created confusion and alarm in many researchers with tened the limited budget available for subscriptions, even regard to OA publishing (Agrawal, 2014; Beall, 2015). at rich institutions. Both initiatives led to the achievement of universal access to scientific publications and benefitted In Spain the two roads, green and gold, have been used sin- greatly from the introduction of the Web and the expansion ce the late 1990s, and are especially popular in the areas of of electronic publications. For most purposes, the starting Social Sciences and Humanities (Villalón-Panzano; Aguillo, point of the Open Access movement took place in 2002 with 1998). In addition, institutional repositories exist in most the publication of the so-called Budapest Open Access Ini- Spanish universities and research-related organizations tiative: (Alonso-Arévalo; Subirats; Martínez-Conde, 2008; Melero http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read et al., 2009). Electronic publication has allowed the emer- gence of many new titles of periodicals, but after almost One of the leaders of this initiative, Stevan Harnad coined two decades not all of them have achieved a relevant im- green road the term to refer to the efforts of depositing pre- pact in their academic communities (Archambault et al., and post-prints in an international network of Open Access 2014; Björk; Roos; Lauri, 2009). The new Spanish legisla- gold road repositories, reserving the denomination for the tion on scientific research promotes self-archiving as well Open Access (hereafter OA) journals offering their contents as publishing in OA journals, even when these journals are et al. free of charge on the Web (Harnad , 2004). requesting APC which is quite common with the most pres- tigious international OA journals (Björk; Solomon, 2015); Spain has relatively high research output however, APC are questioned within Spain and Latin Ame- in OA journals when compared with the rica (Abadal, 2015). world average This study focuses on the situation of OA publishing among the Spanish research community, analyzing the impact of such output as well as comparing international collabora- These two alternative venues, green and gold, have ex- tion patterns between gold OA papers and the overall pro- panded in the research community and are promoted by duction of Spain. It also offers a comparison between the different parties. While some journals have been forced performance of Spain and other European countries. So far, to change their business model, in many cases adopting no other study has been found analyzing the gold OA re- an APC policy (article processing charges) in order to sup- search output of Spanish institutions, although a recent stu- 18 El profesional de la información, 2016, enero-febrero, v. 25, n. 1. eISSN: 1699-2407 Bibliometric and benchmark analysis of gold Open Access in Spain: big output and little impact dy by Abadal et al. (2015) focused on the journals. Some studies can be found in relation to other coun- tries. For instance, Van- Leeuwen, Tatum, and Wouters (2015) analyzed the state of gold OA for The Netherlands, Den- mark, and Switzerland concluding that the share of output from OA jour- nals lagged behind when compared with non-OA journals. They also found out that gold OA papers consistently have a lower citation impact and are published in journals with a low impact factor. The present paper also offers Figure 1. Share of papers published by Spain in gold Open Access journals compared with the global share a comparison with 17 Eu- according to Web of Science during the 2005-2014 period ropean countries as well as with the world average, offering the perfect benchmark to compare the status of will be above 1 if its impact is higher than the the world gold OA in these countries. average. If the value is below 1 it is interpreted as below the world average impact. 2. Material and methods - % Documents in top 10% for OA and all publications. Share This paper analyzes the Spanish research output published of the whole OA output of a given country included within in gold OA journals indexed in the Web of Science and com- the top 10% of highly cited papers.