On the impact of gold open access journals – an analysis at macro, meso und micro level

Abstract

This study has been performed at three different levels: 1) Macro: considering all the OA journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) or Ulrich’s web, 2) Meso: considering the Austrian publication output and 3) Micro: considering the publication out-put of the University of Vienna (UoV).
Goals of this study are the identification of Gold Open Access (GOA) journals which are also indexed in Journal Citation Reports (JCR), and the analysis of their geographical, disciplinary and publisher distribution. Special emphasis was put on the impact analysis performed according to their Impact Factor (IF) and assignment to quartiles in JCR.
The results show that the rate of GOA journals featuring a JCR IF is low and their per-centage in the Top 25 % (Q1) in their corresponding subject category is even lower.
Whereas the output of Austria and UoV in GOA journals indexed in JCR is relatively small, an increase of importance can be observed over the years 2007-2011. On the level of scientific disciplines, it is observed that Medicine and Life Sciences outperform the oth-er fields of science.
It is noteworthy that, for the case of Austria and UoV, more than 50% of all GOA publica-tions in JCR indexed journals are located in Q1. This fact points out that Austrian authors tend to choose high impact journals when choosing the Gold OA publication model.
This study aims to show, that the availability of (JCR) high impact titles widely influences publishing strategies of Austrian authors. Therefore, the launch of new high qualitative GOA journals as well as the improvement of already existent titles will benefit and accel-erate the implementation of the GOA road as future channel for scholarly communication.