Open access articles in radiology are cited, downloaded, and shared more than articles that require a subscription to access, according to Dutch research published online on 19 August in European Radiology.
A team led by Rayan Alkhawtani of the University Medical Center Groningen analyzed 500 original studies that had been published in European Radiology between April 23, 2015, and July 6, 2017. Of these articles, 86 were open access and 414 were available only with a subscription.
After performing linear regression analysis, the authors found that the open access articles were significantly more cited (beta coefficient = 3.588, p = 0.016), downloaded (beta coefficient = 759.801, p < 0.001), and shared (beta coefficient = 0.748, p = 0.002) than subscription access article. Also, they reported that articles from Europe or North America were significantly more frequently published as open access compared with articles that had corresponding authors from Asia.
