Abstract
Neuropsychopharmacology (NPP) offers the option to publish articles in different tiers of an open access (OA) publishing system: Green, Bronze, or Hybrid. Green articles follow a standard access (SA) subscription model, in which readers must pay a subscription fee to access article content on the publisher’s website. Bronze articles are selected at the publisher’s discretion and offer free availability to readers at the same article processing charge (APC) as Green articles. Hybrid articles are fully OA, but authors pay an increased APC to ensure public access. Here, we aimed to determine whether publishing tier affect the impact and reach of scientific articles in NPP. A sample of 6000 articles published between 2001–2021 were chosen for the analysis. Articles were separated by article type and publication year. Citation counts and Altmetric scores were compared between the three tiers. Bronze articles received significantly more citations than Green and Hybrid articles overall. However, when analyzed by year, Bronze and Hybrid articles received comparable citation counts within the past decade. Altmetric scores were comparable between all tiers, although this effect varied by year. Our findings indicate that free availability of article content on the publisher’s website is associated with an increase in citations of NPP articles but may only provide a moderate boost in Altmetric score. Overall, our results suggest that easily accessible article content is most often cited by readers, but that the higher APCs of Hybrid tier publishing may not guarantee increased scholarly or social impact.
Similar content being viewed by others
Log in or create a free account to read this content
Gain free access to this article, as well as selected content from this journal and more on nature.com
or
References
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Policy and Global Affairs, Board on Research Data and Information, Committee on Toward an Open Science Enterprise. Open Science by Design: Realizing a Vision for 21st Century Research. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2018.
Tennant JP, Waldner F, Jacques DC, Masuzzo P, Collister LB, Hartgerink CHJ. The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review. F1000Res. 2016;5:632.
Gasparyan AY, Ayvazyan L, Kitas GD. Open access: changing global science publishing. Croat Med J. 2013;54:403–6.
BOAI15. https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/boai15/. Accessed 31 August 2023.
Iyengar KP, Vaishya R. Article-level metrics: A new approach to quantify reach and impact of published research. J Orthop. 2023;40:83–6.
Jordan CJ, Neigh GN, Carlezon WA. Neuropsychopharmacology (NPP): relationships between online attention and citation counts. Neuropsychopharmacol. 2019;44:1513–5.
Triaridis S, Kyrgidis A. Peer review and journal impact factor: the two pillars of contemporary medical publishing. Hippokratia 2010;14:5–12.
Taylor M. Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow: five altmetric sources observed over a decade show evolving trends, by research age, attention source maturity and open access status. Scientometrics. 2023;128:2175–200.
Altmetric Attention Score. Altmetric. https://help.altmetric.com/support/solutions/articles/6000233311-how-is-the-altmetric-attention-score-calculated-. Accessed 31 August 2023.
The donut and Altmetric Attention Score. Altmetric. https://www.altmetric.com/about-us/our-data/donut-and-altmetric-attention-score/. Accessed 31 August 2023.
Long HL, Drown L, El Amin M. The effect of open access on scholarly and societal metrics of impact in the ASHA journals. J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2023;66:1948–57.
Clayson PE, Baldwin SA, Larson MJ. The open access advantage for studies of human electrophysiology: impact on citations and altmetrics. Int J Psychophysiol. 2021;164:103–11.
Xie F, Ghozy S, Kallmes DF, Lehman JS. Do open-access dermatology articles have higher citation counts than those with subscription-based access? PLoS One. 2022;17:e0279265.
Grover S, Elwood AD, Patel JM, Ananth CV, Brandt JS. Altmetric and bibliometric analysis of obstetrics and gynecology research: influence of public engagement on citation potential. Am J Obstet Gynecol. 2022;227:300.e1–300.e44.
AlRyalat SA, Saleh M, Alaqraa M, Alfukaha A, Alkayed Y, Abaza M, et al. The impact of the open-access status on journal indices: a review of medical journals. F1000Res. 2019;8:266.
Black CS, Lehane DJ, Burns C, O’Donnell BD. An examination of the effect of open versus paywalled access publication on the disseminative impact and citation count of publications in intensive care medicine and anesthesia. J Crit Care. 2018;46:88–93.
Vadhera AS, Lee JS, Veloso IL, Khan ZA, Trasolini NA, Gursoy S, et al. Open access articles garner increased social media attention and citation rates compared with subscription access research articles: an altmetrics-based analysis. Am J Sports Med. 2022;50:3690–7.
Cueto R, Harris AB, Root K, Sabharwal S, Raad M, Oni JK. Open access publication in total knee arthroplasty is associated with increased social media attention, but is not associated with increased citations. J Arthroplasty. 2023:S0883-5403(23)00627-7.
License to Publish/Open Access/Self-Archiving | Neuropsychopharmacology. https://www.nature.com/npp/authors-and-referees/ltp-oa-archiving. Accessed 31 August 2023.
‘Bronze’ open access supersedes green and gold. Nature Index. 2018. https://www.nature.com/nature-index/news/bronze-open-access-supersedes-green-and-gold. Accessed 31 August 2023.
Hafeez DM, Jalal S, Khosa F. Bibliometric analysis of manuscript characteristics that influence citations: a comparison of six major psychiatry journals. J Psychiatr Res. 2019;108:90–94.
2023. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Creative Commons — Attribution 4.0 International — CC BY 4.0Accessed 31 August.
D’Agostino R, Pearson ES. Tests for departure from normality. empirical results for the distributions of b2 and √ b1. Biometrika. 1973;60:613–22.
Benjamini Y, Krieger AM, Yekutieli D. Adaptive linear step-up procedures that control the false discovery rate. Biometrika. 2006;93:491–507.
Jordan CJ, Martinowich K, Carlezon WA. Neuropsychopharmacology (NPP): update on relationships between online attention and citation counts. Neuropsychopharmacol. 2021;46:1061–3.
Acknowledgements
BKC completed the project as part of an NPP Editorial Internship. We thank the staff at NPP, ACNP, and Springer Nature as well as Drs. Sofiya Hupalo and Margaux Kenwood, for insightful comments on the project and paper.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
T.C. collected citations data. B.K.C. collated Altmetrics data, performed data analysis, made figures, and wrote the paper. T.P.G. and L.M.M. edited the paper.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
All authors have roles at N.P.P. BKC is the Editorial Intern. T.C. is an Editorial Assistant at Springer Nature. L.M.M. and T.P.G. are Principal Editors.
Additional information
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary information
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Chen, B.K., Custis, T., Monteggia, L.M. et al. Effects of open access publishing on article metrics in Neuropsychopharmacology. Neuropsychopharmacol. 49, 757–763 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-024-01796-4
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Version of record:
Issue date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-024-01796-4
This article is cited by
-
Optimizing social media initiatives to promote Neuropsychopharmacology (NPP) publications
Neuropsychopharmacology (2025)
-
Assessing the academic and societal impact of Open Access: bibliometric and altmetric analyses
Scientometrics (2025)
-
What potential ethical concerns are associated with paid open access in medical research?
Ethik in der Medizin (2025)
-
Different open access routes, varying societal impacts: evidence from the Royal Society biological journals
Scientometrics (2024)
