Comparing companion open access journals to their traditional journal counterparts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many traditional journals have launched companion open access (cOA) journals with similar scope and aims. These journals seek better article dissemination through removal of the paywall and use of article processing charges (APCs). Traditional journals often suggest transfer to their cOA journal, leaving authors with a decision to accept transfer and pay an APC or resubmit elsewhere. We aim to compare costs and impact of these journals to better inform authors. The top 15 U.S.-based traditional journals within medicine, surgery, pediatrics, and OB/GYN were identified based on 2023 impact factor. Those with cOA journals were included, and all publication data between 2011 and 2023 were extracted. Citation counts were compared using Poisson regression; author demographics were analyzed using multivariable logistic regression. There were 14 traditional journals with cOA counterparts, constituting 52,232 publications from 36,577 authors. cOA articles had half the citations of traditional publications (9.4 vs 18.2) and collected an estimated $35 million in APCs. Female and low/middle income country (LMIC) authors were more likely to publish in cOA journals (aOR = 1.23, 1.14, respectively). Authors publishing in companion open access journals incur higher publication costs, and yet, receive fewer citations per publication.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.137 | 0.026 |
| Open science | 0.036 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.498 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".