From closed to open access: A case study of flipped journals

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.