Sustainability of open access citation advantage: the case of Elsevier's author-pays hybrid open access journals

The present study tended to investigate the sustainability of citation advantage of author-pays hybrid open access journals. Applying a comparative citation analysis method, it explored a sample consisted of 160,168 articles in 47 Elsevier APC-funded hybrid open access journals published in the periods 2007-2011 and 2012-2015. Two citation windows were selected in the study: one ranging from the journals' publication years until 2013 (obtained from Sotudeh et al. in Scientometrics 104(2):581-608, 2015), and another ranging from the journals' publication years until 2016 (data collection date in the present study). The comparative citation analysis of the older articles (published in 2007-2011) in the two mentioned citation windows indicated that they sustained their citation advantage in comparison with the toll-access ones. The citation advantage was also confirmed for more recent APC-funded OA articles (published in 2012-2015). Therefore, the passage of time did not seem to affect the citation gap between APC-funded OA and toll-access articles, and the citation advantage of the APC-funded OA articles was apparently a sustainable phenomenon. Moreover, the number of the APC-funded OA articles increased in comparison with that of the toll-gated articles. In addition, the APC-funded OA articles exhibited citation advantages in almost all fields.