Scientific impact increases when researchers publish in open access and international collaboration: A bibliometric analysis on poverty-related disease papers.

Background: The European & Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (EDCTP), like many other research funders, requires its grantees to make papers available via open access (OA). This article investigates the effect of publishing in OA journals and international collaboration within and between European and sub-Saharan African countries on citation impact and likelihood of falling into the top 1% and top 10% most cited papers in poverty-related disease (PRD) research.

Methods: Disease-specific research publications were identified in the Web of Science™ and MEDLINE using Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) terms.