Open Access Journal Profile
This feature introduces new descriptive data in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) journal profile pages. The new tile displays a breakdown of the journal’s articles by Open Access (OA) type.
For a hybrid journal, one that publishes both OA content and subscription content, users can easily identify the number of articles published under a subscription access model and identify those published under Creative Commons licenses (gold open access).
The goal is to increase transparency around how these articles contribute to a journal’s citations.
The data included in this tile summarizes the items published in the journal in the JCR data year and in the previous two years. For example, in the 2018 JCR data, released in June 2019, the open access data shows the publication model (OA or subscription) of materials published in 2016, 2017 and 2018, and citations in 2018 to these items. All three tiles in this section of the profile page—OA data, Contributions by Country/Region, and Contributions by Organization—use this three-year set of published items to provide descriptive analysis of the content and community of the journal.
The identification of the open access types comes from Our Research, the same source used for Web of Science and InCites open access identification.
Our Research OA Classifications Used in Web of Science Group Products
Within SCIE and SSCI, of the Web of Science Core Collection, which is the data source for the JCR, we use a data feed from Our Research to identify five types of open access papers:
- DOAJ-Gold
- Other Gold,
- Bronze,
- Green Published
- Green Accepted
OA Classifications Used in JCR
Gold OA
To show the relationship between OA status at publication and citations in the JCR data, the two gold OA types are grouped together. The Gold OA label on the JCR profile page refers to papers tagged as DOAJ Gold or Other Gold in the Web of Science Core Collection. The data are current as of the time of JCR extraction from the Web of Science.
Subscription and Free to Read
Articles in the Web of Science identified as Bronze are labeled Free to Read in the JCR. Bronze is a relatively recent term, used by Our Research to describe content that is free to read on the publisher site, but not published under an OA license. Papers that are categorized as Green Published and Green Accepted in Web of Science are often subject to an embargo after initial publication and available to subscribers only for that time; these are included in the Subscription and free to read group.
Citable Items
All materials indexed as articles or reviews in Web of Science are counted as Citable Items in the denominator of the Journal Impact Factor (JIF). They represent the scholarly contribution of a journal to the literature. Citations to citable items account for nearly 98% of citations linked to journal content in Web of Science.
Other
Any substantive, indexed item in the journal, such as editorial material, correspondence, news, meeting abstracts, etc., are non-citable items. These items are not counted as part of the scholarly content in the JIF denominator, and are grouped as other content in the JCR.
Unlinked
Citations in the JCR are aggregated according to the journal title, independent of whether they are linked to an individual item in the journal. Although the rate of linked citations can vary between journals, over 95% of citations in the JCR are linked to an item in the journal. Unlinked citations are included in all JCR citation metrics and are displayed specifically in the citation histogram, therefore, it is important they are represented in the descriptive citation data in the OA data.
The current data was extracted from Our Research in April 2019 and will be periodically updated from the date of the release onwards. Journals disabled based on the March 2019 extract are now available.
