The booming of open access publications in science

"The last decade has witnessed a significant growth of open access (OA) publications1 . The existing forms of OA include OA options of traditionally closed-access journals (such as the Green and Gold OA routes) as well as a substantially different publishing model, known as OA publishing2 . OA is considered to be able to accelerate the production and dissemination of knowledge. Backed by dominant research funders across the world2 , it has fundamentally changed the landscape of scholarly publishing3 . The Web of Science (WoS) started to provide identifiers for articles from OA journals in 2014, offering an opportunity to explore the development of publications generated from the OA publishing model. This study uses the Web of Science–Science Citation Index Expanded (WoS–SCIE) to illustrate the trajectories of OA publications in science. We collected data on 30 June 2015 with the time span set as 2000–2014. Four document types (articles, letters, notes and reviews) were included4 ..."