Effects of journal choice on the visibility of scientific publications: a comparison between subscription-based and full Open Access models

This study analyses the performance of journals and publications based on their type of archiving policies. The main objective is the assessment of the feasibility of the journal typologies with a special emphasis on the comparison of both the subscription-based and the Open Access models. The analysis is backed by the combination of data contained in four of the main bibliographic databases to offer comprehensive, new and updated data on OA (Sherpa-RoMEO, DOAJ, Web of Science and Scopus). A total of 18.3 million articles and reviews were analysed between 2005 and 2015. In the comparison of Web of Science and Scopus, we found that the proportion of OA publications is 5% inferior in WoS. The growth of the total number of documents published in Gold OA journals is noteworthy in the period analysed. However, the study of the proportion of publications and citations in both databases revealed that Gold OA journals only increased their proportion of publications but not the proportion of citations. Trends in the proportion of highly cited publications (top 1%) depicted that OA journals were unable to exceed of this expected 1% in the 11 years under analysis.