Open access mythbusting: Testing two prevailing assumptions about the effects of open access adoption

This article looks at whether there is evidence to support two prevailing assumptions about open access (OA). These assumptions are: (1) fully OA journals are inherently of poorer quality than journals supported by other business models and (2) the OA business model is more ‘competitive’ than the subscription journal access business model. By combining citation‐based impact scores with data from publishers’ price lists, the authors were able to look for relationships between business model, price, and ‘quality’ across several thousands of journals. They found no evidence suggesting that OA journals suffer significant quality issues compared with non‐OA journals. Furthermore, authors do not appear to ‘shop around’ based on OA price.