1 Introduction
Chemistry scholars in the late 1990s were amid the early adopters of
open access (OA) publishing in the digital era, namely of publishing
scientific articles and reviews in journals freely accessible on the
internet. Writing in 2007 in one such new OA journal, Hodd reported that
in chemistry there were “currently over 50 open access journals”
[1]. Examples include Arkivoc publishing OA papers in
synthetic organic chemistry since 2000, and the Beilstein Journal
of Organic Chemistry launched in 2005. Both journals do not require
authors to pay an article processing charge (APC).
Publishing scientific articles accessible without restrictions largely
improves the visibility of the freely accessible study. Accordingly,
comparing the number of citations of articles in physics published
between 1992 and 2002 made OA by self-archiving with the citations of
articles from the same journals that were not made OA by their
authors, in 2004 Harnad and Brody first unveiled that the OA/non-OA
citation ratio varied between 2.5 and 5.7 [2].
As it happened with preprints [3], the early successful adoption of
OA publishing amongst chemistry scholars subsequently faded away. As a
result, with less than 20% papers being freely available in 2016
chemistry was found to be the discipline with the lowest fraction of OA
papers amid 100,000 research papers published between 2009 and 2015
[4]. For comparison, the same statistical analysis found that more
than 50% of biomedical research and mathematics papers were freely
accessible.
The advantages in terms of enhanced visibility, number of citations,
career and funding opportunities of open science, however, are too
numerous for chemistry scholars continuing to ignore open science. In
2018, the percentage of chemistry papers published as open access (in
the Web of Science category “chemistry multidisciplinary”) increased
to 26% of the total [5].
Showing evidence of enhanced impact of OA journals, in 2017 the top
three most cited multidisciplinary scientific journals were all fully OA
journals (Table 1).
Table 1 . Top five multidisciplinary scientific journals ranked
by number of citations in 2017. [Source: Clarivate Analytics, 2018].