The Hybrid Open Access Citation Advantage: How Many More Cites is a $3,000 Fee Buying You?

Abstract

We study the hybrid open access (HOA) citation effect. Under HOA Pilot agreements, HOA is assigned for all articles of eligible authors. We use unique data on 208 (1,121) HOA (closed access) economics articles. We control for the quality of journals, articles and institutions and citations to RePec pre-prints. Performing Poisson quasi-maximum likelihood regressions, HOA turns out to be a significant predictor of citations with marginal effects ranging between 22% and 26%. However, once we additionally control for institution quality and citations to RePEc pre-prints, the marginal HOA citation advantage turns out to insignificant and drops to 0.4%.