Global open access slowly growing, study finds

Latin American and Indian publications were more likely to be freely available. Copyright: Flickrcudamore

By: Yojana Sharma

We encourage you to republish this article online and in print, it’s free under our creative commons attribution license, but please follow some simple guidelines:

You have to credit our authors.
You have to credit SciDev.Net — where possible include our logo with a link back to the original article.
You can simply run the first few lines of the article and then add: “Read the full article on SciDev.Net” containing a link back to the original article.
If you want to also take images published in this story you will need to confirm with the original source if you're licensed to use them.
The easiest way to get the article on your site is to embed the code below.

For more information view our media page and republishing guidelines.

The full article is available here as HTML.

Press Ctrl-C to copy

<div class="article-wrap">
<div id="article-introduction">
<h1>Global open access slowly growing, study finds</h1>
<h4>By: Yojana Sharma</h4>
</div>
<br />
<br />

<div id="article-body">
<p>One in five scientific papers is now available freely on the internet, the first global study of research papers across all disciplines has found.</p>
<p>Researchers looked at global data for research papers published in 2008: almost nine per cent were freely available on publishers’ sites (‘gold’ access) and another 12 per cent on authors’ or departmental websites (‘green’ access).</p>
<p>Chemistry papers were least likely to be freely available, with only 13 per cent open access, while Earth Sciences papers were the most likely to be free — with one in three open access.</p>
<p>Latin American and Indian publications were more likely than average to be freely available "because of the availability of open access platforms [there]", said Bo-Christer Björk, lead author based at the Hanken School of Economics in Finland.</p>
<p>But he added that Chinese articles were under-represented in part because of the difficulties of finding them on the search engine, Google.</p>
<p>There have been few comprehensive studies tracking the extent of open access archiving. A 2009 survey published in Information Research by the same team put the proportion of open access papers in 2006 at around 19 per cent.</p>
<p>More copies are being deposited in subject-specific open access archives than on the home pages of authors or their departments as was the case in the past.</p>
<p>"A majority of international publishers actually allow the posting of some versions of published articles, sometimes after a delay, in such repositories," Björk told <em>SciDev.Net</em>.</p>
<p>"Funding organisations are increasingly making it a condition of their funding that a copy is also available open access," Björk said. When around a third of all research articles become open access, libraries will seriously question paying for journals, he added.</p>
<p>"I would expect that the overall percentage would increase by 1–1.5 per year based on the number of open access journals in existence," he said, adding that this might increase further in the future.</p>
<p>"Professor Björk’s data is extremely important but it is not that sensitive," said Stevan Harnad, ‘open access scientometrics’ researcher from the UK-based Southampton University. "What was missing from the analysis was from when papers were made free to view."</p>
<p>"The growth rate in green and gold open access is not the same — green is only at around 15 per cent," he said. "Gold open access is growing fairly steadily year to year while green publishing is accelerating."<br />
The survey was published last month (23 June) in <em>PLoS ONE</em>. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0011273">Link to full article in <em>PLoS ONE</em></a></p>
<p><a href="http://informationr.net/ir/14-1/paper391.html">Link to full article in <em>Information Research </em></a></p>

</div>
<div class="quick-links-wrapper">
<h3>You might also like</h3>
[related-articles]
</div>
<p>This article was originally published on <a href="https://www.scidev.net" target="_blank">SciDev.Net</a>. Read the <a href="https://www.scidev.net/global/news/global-open-access-slowly-growing-study-finds/" target="_blank">original article</a>.</p>
<script type="text/javascript">
(function(e,t,n,r,i,s,o){e["GoogleAnalyticsObject"]=i;e[i]=e[i]||function(){(e[i].q=e[i].q||[]).push(arguments)},e[i].l=1*new Date;s=t.createElement(n),o=t.getElementsByTagName(n)[0];s.async=1;s.src=r;o.parentNode.insertBefore(s,o)})(window,document,"script","//www.google-analytics.com/ga.js","ga");var _gaq=_gaq||[];var _gaq=_gaq||[];_gaq.push(["_setAccount","UA-3223906-8"],["_trackEvent","article interaction","republished","https://www.scidev.net/global/news/global-open-access-slowly-growing-study-finds/",null,true])
</script>
</div>

One in five scientific papers is now available freely on the internet, the first global study of research papers across all disciplines has found.

Researchers looked at global data for research papers published in 2008: almost nine per cent were freely available on publishers’ sites (‘gold’ access) and another 12 per cent on authors’ or departmental websites (‘green’ access).

Chemistry papers were least likely to be freely available, with only 13 per cent open access, while Earth Sciences papers were the most likely to be free — with one in three open access.

Latin American and Indian publications were more likely than average to be freely available "because of the availability of open access platforms [there]", said Bo-Christer Björk, lead author based at the Hanken School of Economics in Finland.

But he added that Chinese articles were under-represented in part because of the difficulties of finding them on the search engine, Google.

There have been few comprehensive studies tracking the extent of open access archiving. A 2009 survey published in Information Research by the same team put the proportion of open access papers in 2006 at around 19 per cent.

More copies are being deposited in subject-specific open access archives than on the home pages of authors or their departments as was the case in the past.

"A majority of international publishers actually allow the posting of some versions of published articles, sometimes after a delay, in such repositories," Björk told SciDev.Net.

"Funding organisations are increasingly making it a condition of their funding that a copy is also available open access," Björk said. When around a third of all research articles become open access, libraries will seriously question paying for journals, he added.

"I would expect that the overall percentage would increase by 1–1.5 per year based on the number of open access journals in existence," he said, adding that this might increase further in the future.

"Professor Björk’s data is extremely important but it is not that sensitive," said Stevan Harnad, ‘open access scientometrics’ researcher from the UK-based Southampton University. "What was missing from the analysis was from when papers were made free to view."

"The growth rate in green and gold open access is not the same — green is only at around 15 per cent," he said. "Gold open access is growing fairly steadily year to year while green publishing is accelerating."
The survey was published last month (23 June) in PLoS ONE.

Link to full article in PLoS ONE

Link to full article in Information Research