Impact of Social Sciences – The number and proportion of freely available articles is growing; reaching 45% of the literature published in 2015

"Using open data and open services, a large-scale study of the state of open and free access has found both the number and proportion of articles freely available to the public is growing, having reached 45% of the literature published in 2015. Juan Pablo Alperin reveals more about this study and suggests we are at the beginning of a new era of large-scale, big data research on the state of scholarly publishing and public access to research. Services such as Unpaywall allow us to see what research people are trying to access, as well as that which is already freely available, and this again shows almost half of overall demand being met by some type of open access."