The Impact of the Open-Access Ophthalmology Journals Status on Journal Indices

Background: In recent years, there has been an increasing trend towards open-access (OA) publishing. Objective: To evaluate the current status of OA Scopus-indexed journals of ophthalmology regarding quality and volume. Design: A Cross-Sectional Study. Setting: University of Jordan Hospital, Amman, Jordan. Method: Active journals indexed by Scopus in 2017 were investigated. Data were gathered and filtered into OA or non-OA ophthalmology journals. Eight variables were adopted to compare the quality of the included journals namely: CiteScore, CiteScore Percentile, Citation Count, Scholarly Output, Percent Cited, SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP), and SCImago Quartiles. Result: One hundred eight ophthalmology journals were indexed by Scopus in 2017. OA journals were 29 (26.9%). We found that OA journals did not have higher impact indices, and the only index that differs between OA and non-OA ophthalmology journals was SJR. Conclusion: The increasing demand of OA publishing has not yet been linked to improved quality and citation advantage.