Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research

Researchers of the Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal, Québec CANADA conclude that open access papers get twice as many citations as non-open access papers, and on top that open access raises quality.

We demonstrate that the greater citation impact of open access research is causal rather than an artifact of author bias (i.e., authors self-selectively making higher quality research open access) by showing that the citation increase is just as great when the open access is mandatory; the open access impact advantage is independent of other correlates of citation impact, and greater for higher quality research.