Great expectations: The role of Open Access in improving countries’ recognition

Hajar Sotudeh () and Abbas Horri
Additional contact information
Hajar Sotudeh: Shiraz University
Abbas Horri: University of Tehran

Scientometrics, 2008, vol. 76, issue 1, No 4, 69-93

Abstract: Abstract Open Access movement has been proven to be capable to enhance the recognition of scientific outputs by improving their visibility. However, it is not clear how different entities benefit from the Open Access advantage; because, the recognition process is dominated by some psychological or realistic biases, resulting in an unequal distribution of citations between different entities. The biases may be exacerbated in Open Access world, e.g. due to the scientists uncertainty about the quality of Open Access materials, or quantitatively or qualitatively unequal presence of countries. Consequently, although, Open Access is able to achieve their potential citations, it is not unlikely that it increases the inequalities, depriving the already “have-nots”. Trying to illuminate how countries are benefiting from Open Access advantage, this study compares citation performances of the world’s countries in two journal sets, i.e. Open Access and non Open Access journals. The results of the analyses conducted at subject field level show that overall recognition gap between developed and less-developed blocks is widened by publishing in Open Access journals. The verification of individual countries’ performances confirms the finding by revealing that open-access-advantaged nations are mainly consisted of developed ones. However, some open-access-advantaged instances are from the less-developed block, which may promisingly suggest early heralds of Open Access potentialities to achieve the recognition of “lost sciences”, leading to relative reparation of the gap in future.

Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-007-1890-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:scient:v:76:y:2008:i:1:d:10.1007_s11192-007-1890-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-007-1890-x

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().