Impact, a Compelling Case for Open Access

It’s July, and once again we have received our 2021 publishing report for Journal of Aquatic Food Product Technology. Our impact factor did not take quite as big a leap up as it did last year (1.020 to 1.767), but it continues to steadily rise and has broken through to 2.006. This continuing increase is great news, as it indicates that the quality of papers is increasing and the number of citations that papers are receiving is similarly increasing. All of this is not possible without the 1000s of hours put in by the many volunteers that help insure the success of this journal. A special thanks goes to our receiving editors and reviewers!

As I was reviewing the metrics the publisher provided, I noted that 2020’s most downloaded article, Microplastics in Fish and Shellfish – A Threat to Seafood Safety (https://doi.org/10.1080/10498850.2020.1739793), also led the journal in 2021 for the most citations received (21 citations in 2021). I was curious about this article, because I saw from the top 10 list provided by the publisher that not only did it have the most citations, it had approximately 3 times as many citations as the remaining articles in the list (6–8 citations). Interestingly, this was the only open access article on the list. Curiously, I decided to see how it fared against other open access articles in the journal. I was very surprised to find out that it was not only the only open access article in the top 10 citation list for 2021 but was also the only open access article in the entire journal! I began to wonder where it stood with regard to all time number of citations. I was very surprised to see it had already made the top 25! Granted, the article covers a very hot topic, and it is a review article where you would expect to see a higher number of citations, but even so it appeared this article was doing significantly better than its peers. After a quick check, I confirmed that the next highest citations for a review article in this journal came in ranked at 45, but it was published almost 20 years ago (2005) and had only 25 citations and 290 views.

In its first year, the Microplastics review article had just over 4,000 views. In its second year, it has almost 10,000 views. The article is a testament to the type of impact that can be achieved when barriers to access are removed. The top cited paper for JAFPT was published back in 1995 and was made available online in 2008 (Table 1). Even with as many citations as this article has, it only has 5% of the views of the 2020 open access article. The 2020 open access article has already surpassed citations/year of the journal’s top articles. I predict it will accomplish in less than 5 years what took 20–30 years for many of the other traditionally published articles to achieve.

Table 1. Metrics for JAFPT’s top cited articles.

Citation Rank	Year Published	Citations	Views	Years Since Publication	Citations per Year
1	1995	269	508	27	10
2	2002	93	375	20	5
3	2004	73	774	18	4
4	2004	57	658	18	3
5	2000	50	166	22	2
6	2005	50	324	17	3
7	2005	44	134	17	3
8	2004	44	254	18	2
9	2003	41	99	19	2
10	1995	41	66	27	2
11	1996	40	24	26	2
12	1998	40	188	24	2
13	2001	39	160	21	2
14	1996	39	57	26	2
15	2005	36	173	17	2
16	2000	35	226	22	2
17	1999	35	173	23	2
18	2002	34	231	20	2
19	2005	34	197	17	2
20	1998	34	140	24	1
21	1997	34	108	25	1
22	2000	34	138	22	2
23	2002	33	182	20	2
24*	2020	32	9989	2	16
25	2002	31	55	20	2

*Journal’s only Open Access Paper.

We all know one of the barriers to submitting a paper as open access is cost of publication. However, given this compelling case, I would strongly suggest that when writing a grant, investigators would be wise to incorporate the cost of publication into the grant. Most granting agencies want evidence of impact from the research. I would argue this example from Journal of Aquatic Food Products Technology provides some compelling evidence on the impact of publishing as open access.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).