Rethinking the open access citation advantage: Evidence from the “reverse‐flipping” journals

Abstract Although the open access citation advantage (OACA) has been discussed extensively, scholars lack a clear understanding of the mechanisms through which switching from subscription‐based model to open access (OA) model affects the citation impact of a scholarly journal. Many journals have switched from subscription to OA, yet they later also flipped their preswitching articles (i.e., those under subscription model) to OA, thus leaving no subscription article to be compared with their postswitching OA counterparts. To detect the switching effect, our study instead focused on 60 journals that “reverse flipped” from OA to subscription. We use a difference‐in‐difference (DiD) analytical framework to analyze two propositions related to OACA, based on the bibliographic and citation data of pre‐ and postswitching publications in these journals. Our findings indicate that reverse flipping is unlikely to affect the journals' impact through changing the visibility of their articles. Instead, it could lead to a systematical shift in the submissions to the journals and thus considerably affect their impact. Our findings have important theoretical and practical implications for subsequent studies, funding agencies, and scholarly journals considering a reverse flip.