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Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Researchhttp://arxiv.org/abs/1001.0361Yassine Gargouri, Chawki Hajjem, Vincent Lariviere, Yves Gingras, Les Carr, Tim Brody, Stevan HarnadABSTRACT: Articles whose authors make them Open Access (OA) byself-archiving them online are cited significantly more than articlesaccessible only to subscribers. Some have suggested that this "OAAdvantage" may not be causal but just a self-selection bias, becauseauthors preferentially make higher-quality articles OA. To test thiswe compared self-selective self-archiving with mandatoryself-archiving for a sample of 27,197 articles published 2002-2006 in1,984 journals. The OA Advantage proved just as high for both.Logistic regression showed that the advantage is independent of othercorrelates of citations (article age; journal impact factor; number ofco-authors, references or pages; field; article type; or country) andgreatest for the most highly cited articles. The OA Advantage is real,independent and causal, but skewed. Its size is indeed correlated withquality, just as citations themselves are (the top 20% of articlesreceive about 80% of all citations). The advantage is greater for themore citeable articles, not because of a quality bias from authorsself-selecting what to make OA, but because of a quality advantage,from users self-selecting what to use and cite, freed by OA from theconstraints of selective accessibility to subscribers only.http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18346