5. Disentangling Gold Open Access

This chapter focuses on the analysis of current publication trends in gold Open Access (). The purpose of the chapter is to develop a full understanding of country patterns, OA journal characteristics and citation differences between gold OA and non-gold OA publications. For this, we will first review current literature regarding Open Access and its ostensible citation advantage. Starting with a chronological perspective we will describe its development, how different countries are promoting OA publishing, and its effects on the journal publishing industry. We will deepen the analysis by investigating the research output produced by different units of analysis. First, we will focus on the production of countries with a special emphasis on citation and disciplinary differences. A point of interest will be identification of national idiosyncrasies and the relation between OA publication and research of local interest. This will lead to our second unit of analysis, OA journals indexed in Web of Science. Here we will focus on journal characteristics and publisher types to clearly identify factors which may affect citation differences between OA and traditional journals which may not necessarily be derived from the OA factor. Gold OA publishing, as opposed to green OA, is being encouraged in many countries. This chapter aims at fully understanding how it affects researchers' publication patterns and whether it ensures an alleged citation advantage as opposed to non-gold OA publications.