2021 STM Report highlights rapid transformation to Open Access

"STM (the Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers) has today published the latest edition of ‘The STM Report’, the organization’s comprehensive overview of the scientific and scholarly publishing market. The revised report, which adopts a new supplement format to be issued in regular thematic updates, reveals significant publisher-driven growth in Open Access (OA) and continued dynamism in the scholarly communication ecosystem....

The latest report shows that recent strong growth in OA publishing is projected to continue. Around a third of all global research articles are now published OA with some countries, such as the UK on track for 90% of their researchers’ output to be published OA within a year due to business model and operational innovations. The new report reveals emerging trends across journal publishing and article growth, the market dominance of formats and disciplines, whilst also exploring the variances across the different markets of the global economy. It details that China remains the world’s most prolific producer of publishable research output, but that, India, Russian Federation, Spain, Italy, Brazil and Australia all have shown strong growth since 2018...."