A comparison of subscription and Open Access journals in construction management and related fields

Abstract

The Internet has profoundly changed the technical infrastructure for the publishing of scientific peer reviewed journals. The traditional business model of selling the content to subscribers is increasingly being challenged by Open Access (OA) journals, which are either run at low cost by voluntary academics or which sell dissemination services to authors. In addition authors in many fields are taking advantage of the legal possibilities of uploading free manuscript versions to institutional or subject-based repositories, in order to increase readership and impact. This study looks closer at the current publishing situation in construction management and related fields and compares empirical data about 17 OA journals and 16 traditional subscription journals. Of the articles published in 2011 in the subscription journals only 9 % could be found as OA copies. The overall OA availability (including articles in OA journals) was 14 % for Construction Management and Economics and 29 % for construction IT scholarship. The study also compared the scientific quality of OA journals to subscription journals using a number of citation indexes. Four of the OA journals are approaching the citation levels (using Scopus data) of the average subscription journals. OA journals are outperforming subscription journals by almost a year in speed of publication.