Making research 'free for everyone' actually makes it harder for scientists who aren't already famous to get noticed.
March 19, 2026
Original Paper
Open access increases policy citations but concentrates recognition: evidence from climate change research
SSRN · 6435914
The Takeaway
While open access increases the number of policy citations for papers, that benefit is almost entirely captured by elite institutions and famous journals. Instead of democratizing science, removing paywalls causes policymakers to rely even more on 'brand name' universities as a signal of quality.
From the abstract
There is a broad consensus that policies, and the policy documents informing them, should be based on high-quality scientific evidence. In practice, however, authors of policy documents face two major challenges: limited access to scientific outputs and limited capacity to assess their validity. This article explores this problem and the impact of the recent exponential growth of open access publishing. Drawing on the literature on citation determinants and guided by signalling theory, we hypoth