This 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 these tiles summarizes the items published in the journal in both the JCR data year and the previous two years. For example, in the 2022 JCR data, released in June 2023, the open access data shows the publication model (OA or subscription) of materials published in 2020, 2021 and 2022, and citations in 2022 to these items.
The identification of the open access types comes from Our Research, the same source used for Web of Science and InCites open access identification.
Classifications Used in Web of Science
In the Web of Science Core Collection, we use a data feed from Our Research to identify five types of open access papers:
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Gold
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Gold - Hybrid
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Free to Read
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Green Published
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Green Accepted
JCR uses only Gold OA for the donut graphs on the profile page. Additional OA data can be viewed on the Web of Science platform.
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 Gold or Gold - Hybrid 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 Free to Read (formerly Bronze)are labeled as such in the JCR. This 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) and the Immediacy Index. 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, independently 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 chart, 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 2021 and will be periodically updated from the date of the release onwards
