The Impact of Open Access on Citations and Alternative Metrics of Scientific Articles in Media and Communication Studies
The article contains the results of the pilot stage of the research into the impact of open access on major relevance indicators of scientific articles on journalism, media and mass communication. The study analyzed scientific articles published during the period from 2015 to 2017 in 32 foreign scientific journals, which are indexed in the international scientometric databases Web of Science and Scopus, and in 11 Russian journals in the category “Mass Communication. Journalism. Mass Media” from the elibrary catalog, which are included in the list of the Higher Attestation Commission (VAK). The research used data from the Web of Science and Scopus databases, Google Scholar metrics, CyberLeninka and elibrary catalogs. The share of open access articles is still rather insignificant, which limits the possibilities of analysing the effects of the new model on key indicators adopted in the scientific community. The results of the analysis of the journals on media communication conducted within the available sample revealed that in general open access has a stronger positive effect on alternative metrics and the use of articles than on citations, which is consistent with the results of previous foreign studies.