Cite Unseen: Theory and Evidence on the Effect of Open Access on Cites to Academic Articles Across the Quality Spectrum

Our previous paper (McCabe and Snyder 2014b) contained the provocative result that, while providing a small boost to cites on average across academic articles, open access can reduce cites to some articles, in particular those published in lower-tier journals. We propose a simple theoretical model in which open access to an article leads more readers to acquire the full text, yielding more cites from some of them but fewer cites from readers who would have cited the article based on superficial knowledge but who refrain once they learn that the article is poorly done or irrelevant. This simple model yields a series of empirical predictions which we test with data for over 200,000 science articles grouped into bins measured by cites received during a pre-study period. Consistent with the theory, the marginal effect of open access is negative for the least-cited articles, positive for the most cited, and generally monotonic for quality levels in between. Also consistent with the theory is that these effects are magnified when articles are placed on, PubMed Central, a particularly broad and convenient open-access platform.