Open data policy and journal impacts: a synthetic difference-in-differences approach

By implementing a novel synthetic difference-in-differences approach, this article assesses whether adopting open data policy will increase the impact of a journal. Using China Industrial Economics (hereafter CIE, a leading Chinese journal which mandates authors to open their research data/code in the end of 2016) as a quasi-experiment, we show that the introduction of open data policy leads to an increase in CIE's impact factor by a factor of approximately 1.5 to 2 times.