Proportion of Open Access Peer-Reviewed Papers at the European and World Levels

* Report: Proportion of Open Access Peer-Reviewed Papers at the European and World Levels, 2004-2011. By Eric Archambault, Didier Amyot, et al. Science-Metrix, 2013

URL = http://www.science-metrix.com/pdf/SM_EC_OA_Availability_2004-2011.pdf

Summary

'This report re-assesses the Open Access (OA) availability of scholarly publications during the 2004 to 2011 period, for 22 fields of knowledge, as well as for the European Research Area countries, Brazil, Canada, Japan, and the US. Using a strategy to increase the number of free articles retrieved (that is, which aims to increasing recall), led to close to a doubling of the proportion of OA estimated by teams lead by Björk and by Harnad. The present report shows that the tipping point for OA (more than 50% of the papers available for free) has been reached in several countries, including Brazil, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the US, as well as in biomedical research, biology, and mathematics and statistics."

Discussion

JOCELYN KAISER:

"To find out how many gold, green, and hybrid papers are now available, Archambault and his colleagues randomly sampled 320,000 papers published between 2004 and 2011 drawn from Scopus, a database. They then built a software robot that scoured the Internet and online archives in April 2013 for the full text. Unlike some other analysts, they included papers that are only temporarily free (such as a journal’s sample issue). As a check, they also manually searched for 500 papers, revealing that the robot had missed a few. After correcting for this error, the Science-Metrix group concluded that open access reached a 50% “tipping point” in 2011, meaning that one-half of the papers published that year are now freely available.

The team also found that the proportion of gold papers grew from about 4% of all papers in 2004 to 12% in 2011 (see graph). Over the same period, the share of green and hybrid papers hovered around 34% then fell to about 32%. That decline probably reflects the fact that more recently published papers hadn’t yet come out from under embargo, Archambault says. Overall, he notes, the number of open-access papers has been growing by about 2% a year, and the absolute total jumps each year as journals and authors make batches of old papers free.

Such numbers haven’t persuaded other analysts that open access is making a historic transition. “Eric has given us good news about access, not open access,” says Stevan Harnad of the University of Quebec in Montreal, who thinks that delayed access shouldn’t count. Bo-Christer Björk of the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, who’s calculated a smaller number, says that for methodological reasons he’s “not fully convinced” that the 50% figure is valid. However, he says that the study is “important” and will be influential—but not necessarily in the way the authors hope: It may prompt subscription publishers to lengthen embargoes and tighten enforcement.

One publisher says that even if the 50% number is real, publishing hasn’t necessarily reached a tipping point. Fred Dylla, executive director of the American Institute of Physics in College Park, Maryland, argues that open access is expanding because it’s being driven by public policy mandates, not favorable economics. For that reason, “I don’t see us reaching the top of a hill and now rushing to the bottom. It’s more like the slope is getting smaller,” he says.

However imperfect, the Archambault analysis is welcome, says open-access advocate Peter Suber, director of Harvard University’s Office for Scholarly Communication. It shows that open access “has entered the mainstream,” he says." (http://news.sciencemag.org/scientific-community/2013/08/free-papers-have-reached-tipping-point-study-claims)