Open Access 2016: A Year of Price Bargaining, Preprints, and a Pirate | Absolutely Maybe

lterrat's bookmarks 2017-02-07

Summary:

"A few years ago, I wrote that open access (OA) publications were gaining momentum. Based on a study of 2006 to 2010 in the biomedical literature database, PubMed, our access to publications was apparently growing somewhat steadily.

It seems to have stalled after that. With a push towards 100% open access for publicly funded research in major European countries and some academic institutions, though, this could turn out to be a long lull, not a plateau. It’s starting to look as though accessibility of publications increases in waves, with those waves arriving in different intervals, geographically and by academic discipline: 2020 looks like the year to watch now.

To get a rough idea of how much reader access there is for biomedicine, I ran some searches in PubMed. It’s not precise, for a few reasons. Because NIH-granted research is deposited in full in PubMed’s repository, PubMed Central, it means there are articles from some journals without the whole journal contents. On the other hand, the search for articles available in full text in PubMed underestimates how many articles are out there for free somewhere online. And the contents of PubMed aren’t only research: access requirements tend to apply only to research reports.

Only 27% of PubMed records added in the last 11 months had full texts. That’s strongly affected by public access requirements at the NIH and elsewhere that only require availability of full texts 12 months after publication. I looked at publications to the end of 2015 to see what happens after that embargo expires.

The level of accessibility for publications from 2005 is (23%). In 2010 it was up to 33%, but in 2013-2015 it had leveled out to about 40%. That varies by country, with less public access in some areas of becoming a bigger proportion of the literature. It’s 53% for papers listing at least one author in the USA and 48% with at least one in the UK. For Germany, it’s around 40%, and it’s 37% in China and France. (Details of my searches and the results are here.)

Making a big dent in that second half of literature – and the embargo – is going to take action by funders of research and libraries, at (supra)national level and at individual institutions. More of that is coming. Increasingly, the push isn’t just for access to read, but for accessible data and right to data and text mining, too. The embargo isn’t being challenged as widely, though.

The slow progress in accessibility of publications isn’t the only problem. There’s the high cost when author processing charges (APCs), which are also largely added to subscription costs instead of replacing them – and the exploitative 'spam' journal industry financed by APCs.

There may be a silver lining in the cloud: the increased cost pressure introduced by APCs seems to be a force propelling funders and institutions towards deep reform. That gathered force in 2016.

Here are some standout developments, focused on Europe and the US, month by month. (You can catch up on previous years’ posts here.)"

Link:

http://blogs.plos.org/absolutely-maybe/2017/02/07/open-access-2016-a-year-of-price-bargaining-preprints-and-a-pirate/

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Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » lterrat's bookmarks

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Date tagged:

02/07/2017, 19:13

Date published:

02/07/2017, 14:13