OPEN-ACCESS FUNDAMENTALS

The price of academic journal and database subscriptions has skyrocketed in recent decades. As a result, authors and institutions must seriously consider whether the traditional model of academic journal publishing provides the most effective access to scholarly works (Greco et al. Reference Greco, Jones, Wharton and Estelami2007). Of the many proposed alternatives, OA publishing has emerged as the most promising option because it allows articles “to be read for free by anyone, anytime, anywhere—as long as they have Internet access” (Crawford Reference Crawford2011, 11). In contrast, any article that is locked behind a paywall is considered TA. Advocates make a strong case for OA publishing as an egalitarian method of information dissemination because it allows everyone and anyone to access scientific research at the click of a button. OA allows researchers in developing states or at poorly funded institutions to access the same resources as their colleagues at well-funded institutions (Arunachalam Reference Arunachalam2008; Crawford Reference Crawford2011; Guédon Reference Guédon2008).

There are many nuances in OA publishing; however, at the core, all OA is a version of either Gold OA or Green OA. ^{Footnote 1} Within the Gold category, there are several different business models. The point of commonality is that in all forms of Gold OA—whether it is a fully OA journal or an article processing charge (APC) is paid to a TA journal to make the article OA—the route to OA is through the publisher. There is a common (mis)perception that “Gold” means a “pay-to-play” model, which results in scholars’ many concerns about OA publishing (Harnad Reference Harnad2010; Suber Reference Suber2013). Xia’s (Reference Xia2010) findings indicated that these concerns are likely predicated on the belief that OA publishing is a low-quality model in which research is subjected to lax peer review (if any). Additionally, because most high-ranked journals are not OA, scholars may be concerned that publishing in an OA journal could be detrimental to hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions. Although there are some disreputable OA journals, most Gold OA journals are peer-reviewed with safeguards in place to ensure that financial concerns and APCs are kept separate from the editorial- and article-acceptance process. For example, the American Journal of Political Science has a Gold OA option (i.e., OnlineOpen) that is made available to an author only after an article has been accepted. ^{Footnote 2} One benefit of Gold OA is that because articles have been made OA by the journal publishers, they are accessible from a general Internet search as well as from traditional academic databases.

In the Green OA model, the route to OA is through the author herself. She is free to publish with the high-quality journal of her choice; she then self-archives her work in an institutional repository or on her personal website. ^{Footnote 3} Provided that an author has chosen to submit her work to a reputable journal, the Green OA model ameliorates all of the concerns mentioned previously. There are no fee-based variants of Green OA publishing; therefore, there are no pay-to-play issues. The work has been peer-reviewed, published in a traditional journal, and only then made publicly available. The OA version of an article is then searchable through a general web search (e.g., Google Scholar); however, it would not be found in a traditional academic database search. ^{Footnote 4} Although this is a drawback to the model, Green OA is a particularly attractive model for the social sciences and humanities because it is essentially free to an author—and authors in those disciplines are less likely to have grant-funded research projects than colleagues in the natural sciences.

Regardless of the OA model, in theory, an author should see increased citations as a result of making her work freely available—what Doty (Reference Doty2013) called the “open-access citation effect” (OACE). Providing evidence to support that theory has been the main thrust of research about the efficacy of OA. ^{Footnote 5} In the social sciences, research indicates that there is a positive OACE. For example, Hajjem, Harnad, and Gingras (Reference Hajjem, Harnad and Gingras2005) found that there is an across-the-board citation advantage for each discipline in the study, including economics, political science, and sociology. Similarly, Xia and Nakanishi (Reference Xia and Nakanishi2012) found a positive OACE in their study of anthropology research. More recently, Atchison and Bull (Reference Atchison and Bull2015) found that political scientists receive a positive OACE when they follow the Green OA model and self-archive their work. Despite the large volume of research into the issue, the OACE literature has ignored an important question: Do women and men benefit from OA publishing at similar rates? To put this question into context, it is important to understand the significant differences between men and women in academic publishing.

GENDER AND ACADEMIC CITATIONS

Researchers have explored the possibility of differences between men and women in both citation patterns and citation rates. First, researchers examined the way in which gender affects the pattern of who cites whom, and it is clear that a two-way gendered split in citation patterns exists. The first gendered citation pattern is that women tend to cite women more often and men tend to cite men more often (Baldi Reference Baldi1998; Ferber Reference Ferber1988; McElhinny et al. Reference McElhinny, Hols, Holtzkener, Unger and Hicks2003). There is evidence that this particular gendered citation pattern results from gendered academic networks—networks in which women are more at the margins of several disciplines (Aksnes et al. Reference Aksnes, Rorstad, Piro and Sivertsen2011). The second gendered citation pattern concerns self-citation: the available evidence indicates that women self-cite at far lower rates than men across all disciplines (Wilson Reference Wilson2014). ^{Footnote 6}

Second, scholars also attempted to determine whether men receive a positive GCE in academic publishing (as measured by citation rates). The results are mixed. On one the hand, researchers in several fields found a significant positive GCE for men (Aksnes et al. Reference Aksnes, Rorstad, Piro and Sivertsen2011; Davenport and Snyder Reference Davenport and Snyder1995; Gonzalez-Brambila and Veloso Reference Gonzalez-Brambila and Veloso2007). On the other hand, other researchers did not identify any gendered difference in citation rates (Bordons et al. Reference Bordons, Morillo, Teresa Fernández and Gómez2003; Lewison Reference Lewison2001) or a positive GCE for female researchers (Long Reference Long1992; Sonnert and Holton Reference Sonnert and Holton1995). These contradictory findings indicate that Copenheaver, Goldbeck, and Cherubini (Reference Copenheaver, Goldbeck and Cherubini2010, 128) were correct in stating that “Gender differences in citation rate appear to be discipline specific.” This raises the question: What are the gendered effects in political science publishing?

Although there are relatively few studies on gender and publishing in political science in general, Masuoka, Grofman, and Feld (Reference Masuoka, Grofman and Feld2007) found that female political scientists are not cited at rates proportional to their presence in the discipline. In a related study of more than 3,000 articles from multiple international relations (IR) journals, Maliniak, Powers, and Walter (Reference Maliniak, Powers and Walter2013, 19) found that women are cited at significantly lower rates than men, and that “[a]rticles written by female authors are not only being cited less, but authors of the most influential articles are citing them less often.” Furthermore, they found that women are self-citing at significantly lower rates than their male counterparts, and they concluded that this has a significant negative effect on women’s citation rates. Their results provided evidence that there is a significant gender citation gap between men and women in IR, with men receiving an average of 4.8 more citations than their female colleagues (Maliniak, Powers, and Walter Reference Maliniak, Powers and Walter2013, 892). ^{Footnote 7} As the authors noted, the results could be an artifact of male dominance in the IR fields. However, because less than 30% of all political science faculty are women, it is relatively reliable to state that the discipline is male-dominated (American Political Science Association 2011, 4). When considered with the discipline-wide evidence presented by Masuoka et al. (Reference Masuoka, Grofman and Feld2007), this indicates that it is logical to expect a gender citation gap in political science generally, not only IR.

COULD OPEN ACCESS CHANGE GENDERED CITATION EFFECTS?

There is no reason to expect that Green OA—by virtue of the fact that it makes information accessible—would expand researchers’ academic networks, thereby affecting gendered citation patterns and who-cites-whom. Consequently, this article focuses on the issue of gendered citation rates. As discussed previously, OA advocates have framed OA—particularly Green OA—as an egalitarian publication model. Clearly, they are referring to Green OA as a more economically egalitarian model. It levels the playing field for institutions and scholars with limited means by reducing both the subscription fees and the APCs. In contrast, my question is whether Green OA is a gender-egalitarian publishing model: Given the known OA citation advantage, does this effect hold equally for men and women? However, to put that question into perspective, it is important to determine whether women are actually using the Green OA model (i.e., self-archiving) at similar rates as men.

If we view self-archiving as a form of self-promotion, the evidence indicates that women are likely to self-archive at lower rates than men. Winkler (Reference Winkler2000) noted that women’s disinclination to self-promote is a barrier to tenure and promotion. Furthermore, as McIlwee and Robinson (Reference McIlwee and Robinson1992, 71) pointed out, “We associate femininity with…avoidance of bragging and self-promotion. Even if a woman knows her work is outstanding, she should not brag about it.” This is borne out by the evidence of Maliniak, Powers, and Walter (Reference Maliniak, Powers and Walter2013) that women self-cite (i.e., a form of self-promotion) at far lower rates than men. In her comments in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Walter explained those results, noting that women are reticent to self-cite because they perceive it as somewhat unethical (Wilson Reference Wilson2014). Women’s reluctance to self-promote led me to the first hypothesis, as follows:

• • H1: Female political scientists will self-archive at a lower rate than male political scientists.

Previous research indicates that there is an OA citation advantage in political science (Antelman Reference Antelman2004; Atchison and Bull Reference Atchison and Bull2015). However, as noted above, the available evidence in political science also indicates that women are cited at a statistically significant lower rate than their male colleagues (Maliniak, Powers, and Walter Reference Maliniak, Powers and Walter2013; Masuoka et al. Reference Masuoka, Grofman and Feld2007). The lower citation rates of female political scientists may well be due to women’s concentrations at lower ranks and nonresearch institutions (American Political Science Association 2011). Green OA has no effect on those structural barriers to citation. Thus, it is logical to expect that even when their work is more available, female political scientists will continue to be cited at lower rates than their male colleagues. As a result, I hypothesized the following:

• • H2: Female political scientists will see lower OA citation effects than male political scientists.

DATA AND METHODS

In this section, I first explain the data collection. I then provide descriptive statistics, and explain my use of the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney method to test my hypotheses.

Descriptive Statistics

In OA research, the descriptive statistics are often revealing. In this case, they provide an overview of the presence or absence of a gender citation gap for political science journals. Table 1 presents the gender distribution of observations for the entire dataset, as well as the distribution across journals. Almost 67% of the 704 articles were written by men, 12.5% by women, and 20.5% by mixed-gender teams. Figure 1 indicates that more than 56% of the observations are OA, having been self-archived in some format. The descriptive statistics reported in figure 1 provide preliminary evidence in support of H1, given that 32% of solo-female-authored papers in the dataset are self-archived compared to 49% of solo-male-authored papers. Indeed, the disparity was even greater between papers with multiple male authors (71%) and multiple female authors (41%).

Table 1

Gender Distribution of Observations

Figure 1

Open-Access Distribution, by Gender

The citation rates shown in table 2 and figure 2 indicate that male-authored articles receive more citations than female-authored articles. As table 2 indicates, this pattern holds whether men’s articles are single- or multi-authored.

Table 2

Citation Rates by Gender, All Articles

Figure 2

Citation Rates, by Gender

However, these statistics are of limited utility in exploring H2, given that they are the citation rates for the full dataset rather than the population of OA articles.

The statistics presented in table 3 provide a better examination of citation rates for the OA articles. As shown, there is mixed descriptive evidence regarding the hypothesis that women will have less of an OA citation advantage than men. Whereas the OA citation rates for papers written by multiple female authors have lower citation rates than those written by multiple male authors, the citation rates for solo-authored papers written by women are higher than those solo-authored by men.

Table 3

Citation Rates of Open-Access Articles, by Gender

OBSTACLES TO SELF-ARCHIVING

The findings presented in this article demonstrate that women in political science are self-archiving at significantly lower rates than men; however, they do not tell us why women are less likely to self-archive. The extant literature on institutional repositories indicates that, in general, reluctance to self-archive stems from technological qualms, uncertainty regarding copyright limitations, and confusion regarding publishers’ self-archiving policies.

First, many scholars neither know how to use the self-archiving resources available to them (e.g., Google Scholar) nor feel able to dedicate the time to set up their own web page. This issue has been solved primarily at the institutional level, with the implementation of institutional repositories at many colleges and universities in the United States and Canada (Dubinsky Reference Dubinsky2014). Institutional repositories are the easiest method of self-archiving for most scholars. At most colleges and universities, institutional repositories are housed in Library Services and self-archiving is as simple as e-mailing the work to the repository. The staff then handles the technical aspects of posting the article (Dubinsky Reference Dubinsky2014). If resources do not allow for the creation of an institutional repository, authors can upload their work to an external repository such as the Social Science Research Network (Carling Reference Carling and Booluck2012) or create a Google Scholar page. Additionally, researchers can upload their work to sites such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu, which essentially are academic social-networking sites on which researchers can follow one another’s work. These sites have the added benefit of helping researchers to expand their academic networks, but they lack the benefit of copyright-agreement assistance.

A second obstacle to self-archiving is that scholars often are uncertain about what is and is not allowed under a publisher’s copyright agreement (Dubinsky Reference Dubinsky2014). This can become confusing because one publisher may allow an author to self-archive the formatted and branded publisher PDF, whereas others may allow only self-archiving of the version that was initially submitted to the journal (pre-review); still others will allow self-archiving of the accepted version. ^{Footnote 11} This obstacle typically is overcome with help from the institutional repository staff: most institutions have an in-house expert who will assist with interpreting copyright agreements and ensure that authors are self-archiving as allowed under the agreements. Also, whether or not the institution has an institutional repository, faculty can request workshops on publishing, OA, and copyright agreements; these are helpful in clarifying the post-acceptance process. For scholars who want to research a journal’s or a publisher’s self-archiving policy, the SHERPA/RoMEO database is an excellent resource to clarify those policies. ^{Footnote 12}

A final obstacle is that some publishers still do not allow any form of self-archiving. If an author has not determined the publisher’s self-archiving policy before signing the copyright agreement, she may be signing away the ability to self-archive. Again, the institutional repository staff is the best resource for interpreting a copyright agreement. Additionally, if a publisher’s standard agreement indicates that self-archiving is not allowed, an author can petition for an exception, which may be called an OA addendum to the copyright agreement. ^{Footnote 13}