Guest Post: What Can We Learn from One Million Open Access Articles? - The Scholarly Kitchen

peter.suber's bookmarks 2021-12-07

Summary:

"Overall I believe the transition is going well. From a slow start, as a sector we have now reached the point where, in 2020, a third (33%) of articles were published OA.

Looking however at our 1m, this does, though, mask quite a variation amongst different academic disciplines. From our data, medical research is overwhelmingly driving the transition, with Medicine accounting for 44% of our 1m articles. The next highest discipline is Life Sciences, which accounts for 17%. This trend of Medicine outperforming the other disciplines so strongly has barely changed from 2015.

We are starting to see some strong growth in social science and humanities. As has been documented elsewhere, these disciplines are finding transitioning to OA and meeting Plan S’s requirements more challenging than those in the medical, applied and physical sciences. This is for a variety of reasons, but mainly because of the lack of available funding. It is therefore encouraging to see that, even though this was from a low base, between 2015 and 2020 social science and humanities doubled their OA share.

Our data also brings up some interesting geographic differences. For example, Europe and Asia are strong generators of OA content, accounting for 40% and 33% respectively in 2021. Conversely, North America accounts for 18%, perhaps demonstrating the relatively low engagement with Gold OA amongst US funding bodies to date.

More broadly, in the last 5 years, these 1m articles were downloaded 2.6 billion times. That’s an average of 2,600 downloads for each article, a strong demonstration of the value being derived from OA. Translating that into something institutional librarians might appreciate, that’s a cost of less than Euro 1 per download based on all their one-time APCs...."

Link:

https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2021/12/07/guest-post-what-can-we-learn-from-one-million-open-access-articles/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » peter.suber's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.springer_nature oa.fees oa.gold oa.green oa.versions oa.growth oa.downloads oa.impact oa.repositories oa.journals

Date tagged:

12/07/2021, 14:46

Date published:

12/07/2021, 09:45