Open access and research evaluation: first evidence from the Italian National Evaluation of Research Quality (VQR)

The latest Italian National Evaluation of Research Quality exercise carried out by ANVUR, referred to the period 2015-2019 (VQR 2015-2019), has tackled for the first time the concept of open-access publications: according to VQR rules, scientific publications submitted for evaluation and financed at least by 50% with public fundings should have been made available to the public by July 30th, 2022; their list was published on the ANVUR website. In this paper, two major issues are investigated: first, we analyse the magnitude and incidence of Open Access publications among those submitted for evaluation across scientific fields and geographic areas. Secondly, we identify the articles published in DOAJ indexed journals and compare their evaluation outcomes with those of the articles appeared in journals that are not in the list.