On the bibliometric nature of a foreseeable relationship: open access and education

The open access (OA) publication model is evolving and gaining support in the international scientific community. However, there is no evidence regarding the open access pathways being used in educational research or regarding the relationship between its subject categories and various scientometric indicators. The objective of this study was to use InCites to analyse documents published in journals from 2010 to 2016 in the SSCI categories of 'Education and Educational Research', 'Education, Scientific Disciplines' and 'Education, Special'. The percentage of documents published in the Gold OA model increased gradually over the period studied and was higher than in the Green OA model. 'Education, Scientific Disciplines' was the subcategory with the highest percentage of documents published in the Gold OA. There was greater international collaboration on articles and reviews in Gold OA, especially in the pure model (publications in Gold Open Access journals), and the percentage of articles cited was higher in the Green OA and Gold OA models than in a non-OA model. There was no evidence that the Gold OA hybrid was cited more often than Green OA, and both had more impact than Gold OA pure. The Category Normalized Citation Impact values and the presence of documents in first quartile journals were higher in OA than in non-OA models. A more detailed analysis of the percentiles of the most cited publications clearly demonstrates that OA publications dominated the top percentiles of most cited articles to a greater degree than non-OA publications. The 'Education, Special' subcategory showed the greatest international collaboration and the highest percentage of cited documents.