Open access and Scopus: A new approach to scientific visibility from the standpoint of access

The last few years have seen the emergence of several Open Access (OA) options in scholarly communication, which can broadly be grouped into two areas referred to as gold and green roads. Several recent studies showed how big the extent of OA is, but there have been few studies showing impact of OA in the visibility of journals covering all scientific fields and geographical regions. This research shows the extent of OA from the perspective of the journals indexed in Scopus, as well as influence on visibility, in view of the various geographic and thematic distributions. The results show that in all the disciplinary groups the presence of green road journals widely surpasses the percentage of gold road publications. The peripheral and emerging regions have greater proportions of gold road journals. These journals pertain for the 2 most part to the last quartile. The benefits of open access on visibility of the journals are to be found on the green route, but paradoxically this advantage is not lent by the OA per se, but rather of the quality of the articles/journals themselves, regardless of their mode of access.