Going for gold: exploring the reach and impact of Gold open access articles in hybrid journals [white paper]

In 2021, Springer Nature commissioned an analysis of 60,567 articles published in 1,262 of its hybrid journals, measuring reach by the number of downloads and the attention reflected in the Altmetric Attention Score, and impact through the number of citations.

This white paper presents the findings from that analysis, which show a clear advantage in reach and impact for articles published OA in hybrid journals compared to non-OA articles in the same journals, and for the first time also an advantage for full (Gold) OA articles compared to subscription articles where an earlier article version (such as an accepted manuscript (AM) or preprint) has been self-archived in an OA repository.