Thomas Eger, Armin Mertens and Marc Scheufen

Does open access to journal articles foster citations to these articles? We compare the citation impact of gold and green open access in two disciplines: Biology, and Economics & Management. The empirical analysis covers all articles of these disciplines included in the Web of Science “Journal Citation Reports” between 2000 and 2019. We show that, controlling for confounding variables pertaining to the journals and articles, gold OA increases citations across all articles. However, the individual disciplines feature starkly different effects: a 18.3% increase in biology, compared to a decrease by 30.9% in economics & management. Green OA increases citations to all articles by 82.2%. These results are confirmed by a number of robustness checks.

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