This document presents a case study of journals that have flipped from closed access to open access publishing models. The study analyzed 171 journals that made this transition. It found that while the average journal impact factor initially increased after flipping, the average relative citation of individual articles decreased, consistent with other research. It also found these flipped journals tended to publish fewer articles after the transition. The study aims to better understand how bibliometric indicators of flipped journals change and how quality may influence these effects. Future work will include interviews and examine effects by journal quality.

1. From closed to open access:
A case study of flipped journals
Fakhri Momeni, Nicholas Fraser, Isabella Peters,
Philipp Mayr
GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences
17th ISSI Conference in Rome, Italy
3rd September 2019

2. Recent development
• Editorial Board of Journal of Informetrics
resigned and started a new journal Gold
OA journal Quantitative Science
Studies (QSS)
2
https://www.cwts.nl/news?article=n-r2v294

3. Introduction
• Increased stakeholder pressure to transition
research to Open Access (OA) has led to many
journals ‘flipping’ from a toll access to an open
access publishing model
• Changing the publishing model can influence the
decision of authors to submit their papers to a
journal, and increased article accessibility may
influence citation behaviour
• Here, we assess the effect of the journals
flipping to OA by studying the changes in the
number of published articles, as well as changes
in citation metrics at the article (average relative
3

4. What is a flipped journal?
• A journal transitioning from a subscription-
based (or closed access (CA)) to an open
access (OA) publishing model
4
The journal „Abstract and Applied
Analysis“ converted/ flipped 2006 to
Gold OA
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/aaa
/

5. What is a flipped journal?
• There are also cases of “reverse-flipped”
journals
• But we just consider CA -> OA
flipped journals
5

6. Contribution
• RQ: Can we see typical effects after
flipping?
• The aim of this paper is to show changes
in the number of published articles and
citations after the flipping of a journal.
6

7. Method
• We analysed a set of 171 journals in the
Web of Science (WoS) which flipped to open
access.
• Analysis respectively, as bibliometric
indicators at the article and journal level, to
trace the transformation of flipped journals
– the number of articles,
– average relative citation (ARC)
– Field-normalized impact factor (IF).
7

8. Dataset
• “Journals that converted from TA to OA“ at
Simmons [1]
• 171 journals could be matched with names
and ISSNs to WoS [2]
• We classified our dataset of journals into
the six major domains of the Science
Metrix classification system
8
[1] http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Journals_that_converted_from_TA_to_OA
[2] https://github.com/momenifi/OASE

9. Results
9
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
Numberofflippedjournals
Year
Figure 1. Distribution of flipping years for 171 WoS
journals
Journal conversions carried out
2006 by Hindawi and Spanish
National Research Council

10. Results
10
114
136 143 142 139 132 139 136 138
0
50
100
150
200
250
-4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4
year=2006, n=16
year=2009, n=7
year=2010, n=7
year=2011, n=8
year=2012, n=9
all years, n=58
averagenumberofarticlesperjournals
• Excluding the journals that have at least one year with zero published articles and
flipped after 2012, we obtain a dataset of 58 journals.
Yearly average number of articles for flipped journals four years before and after
flipping (n=number of journals and year is the flipping time).
Year of flipping

11. Results
11
0
0.5
1
1.5
2
-4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4
ARC
Average normalized IF
Comparing the ARC of articles and average normalized IF of 43
flipped journals before and after flipping.
• Decrease in ARC
after flipping
• Slightly higher IFs
after flipping

12. Results
12
Comparing flipped journa
with CA journals in
the same field
• flipped journals show
more strongly fluctuating
long-term trends of
ARC and IF
• for Health Sciences
(A and B) we see an
improvement in ARC and
IF after flipping
• Applied Sciences
(C and D) shows no
long-term advantage

13. Limitations
• Relatively few flipped journals
• Not all journals in the Simmons list could
be matched in WoS
• Comparison with CA journals: limited
numbers of flipped journals across our
samples
13

14. Conclusions
• Our results show that whilst IF increases in the years
immediately following flipping, the article-level ARC
decreases
– In line with results found by Piwowar et al. (2018) and
Archambault et al. (2014) that gold OA articles are cited less
than CA articles.
• We also observe that a lower number of articles are
published after flipping, pointing to a lower tendency
amongst authors to submit to OA journals.
• We will also study in more detail the so-called “quality effect”,
which assumes that high quality publications profit
proportionally more from OA, as they are more citable than
low-quality publications
– The question we seek to answer is whether journals with high
IFs benefit significantly more from flipping to OA than journals
with medium or low IFs.
14

15. Future Work
• Our bibliometric study will be
complemented with more qualitative
information from interviews with
authors, editors, and publishers to reveal
their attitudes towards journal flipping
and OA,
• With this we hope to better show such
interwoven factors that influence
bibliometric indicators of flipped journals.
15

16. Thank you
Dr Philipp Mayr
GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany
Team Leader Information & Data Retrieval
Email: philipp.mayr@gesis.org
Twitter: @philipp_mayr
16
Paper available:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.11682
https://github.com/momenifi/OASE
This work is supported by BMBF
project OASE, grant number
01PU17005A.
https://www.gesis.org/en/research/external-funding-projects/overview-external-funding-projects/oa