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McCabe & Christopher Snyder Share Twitter LinkedIn Email Working Paper 28128 DOI 10.3386/w28128 Issue Date November 2020 Our previous paper (McCabe and Snyder 2014) contained the provocative result that, despite a positive average effect, open access reduces cites to some articles, in particular those published in lower-tier journals. We propose a model in which open access leads more readers to acquire the full text, yielding more cites from some, but fewer cites from those who would have cited the article based on superficial knowledge but who refrain once they learn that the article is a bad match. We test the theory with data for over 200,000 science articles binned by cites received during a pre-study period. Consistent with the theory, the marginal effect of open access is negative for the least-cited articles, positive for the most cited, and generally monotonic for quality levels in between. Also consistent with the theory is a magnification of these effects for articles placed on PubMed Central, one of the broadest open-access platforms, and the differential pattern of results for cites from insiders versus outsiders to the article’s field. Acknowledgements and Disclosures The authors are grateful to Ted Bergstrom, Laura Braunstein, David Card, Brett Danaher, Barbara DeFelice, Stefano DellaVigna, Robert Johnson, Elizabeth Kirk, Andreas Moxnes, Nina Pavcnik, and participants at the American Economic Association Annual Meetings and International Industrial Organization Conference for helpful comments. The authors thank Mark Bard, Jamie Bergeson-Bradshaw, Yilan Hu, Ella Kim, Scot Parsley, Reagen Readinger, Kyle Thomason, and JasonWei for excellent research assistance. Joseph Brightbill at Clarivate provided the Web of Science category data used in our insider/outsider analysis. Funding for the citation data used in this and earlier papers was supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Work on this paper was supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The authors are grateful for the generous funding from these sources. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. 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