The open access advantage for studies of human electrophysiology: Impact on citations and Altmetrics

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.