Gauging scholars’ acceptance of Open Access journals by examining the relationship between perceived quality and citation impact

Abstract Purpose For a set of 1,561 Open Access (OA) and non-OA journals in business and economics, this study evaluates the relationships between four citation metrics—five-year Impact Factor (5IF), CiteScore, Article Influence (AI) score, and SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)—and the journal ratings assigned by expert reviewers. We expect that the OA journals will have especially high citation impact relative to their perceived quality (reputation). Design/methodology/approach Regression is used to estimate the ratings assigned by expert reviewers for the 2021 CABS (Chartered Association of Business Schools) journal assessment exercise. The independent variables are the four citation metrics, evaluated separately, and a dummy variable representing the OA/non-OA status of each journal. Findings Regardless of the citation metric used, OA journals in business and economics have especially high citation impact relative to their perceived quality (reputation). That is, they have especially low perceived quality (reputation) relative to their citation impact. Research limitations These results are specific to the CABS journal ratings and the four citation metrics. However, there is strong evidence that CABS is closely related to several other expert ratings, and that 5IF, CiteScore, AI, and SJR are representative of the other citation metrics that might have been chosen. Practical implications There are at least two possible explanations for these results: (1) expert evaluators are biased against OA journals, and (2) OA journals have especially high citation impact due to their increased accessibility. Although this study does not allow us to determine which of these explanations are supported, the results suggest that authors should consider publishing in OA journals whenever overall readership and citation impact are more important than journal reputation within a particular field. Moreover, the OA coefficients provide a useful indicator of the extent to which anti-OA bias (or the citation advantage of OA journals) is diminishing over time. Originality/value This is apparently the first study to investigate the impact of OA status on the relationships between expert journal ratings and journal citation metrics.