While Global Data on Open Access Show Consistency Across Databases, Significant Cross-Country Differences Remain | Open Science

ab1630's bookmarks 2018-05-30

Summary:

"In their recent working paper, published at ArXiv on March 16, 2018, Alberto Martín-Martín et al. have found that effective Open Access to articles indexed by Google Scholar can reach more than 54% with important variation in findings for different access formats, subject areas and geographic areas. In their pre-print paper yet awaiting peer review results, even through its initial version is already available via the repository, Alberto Martín-Martín, Rodrigo Costas, Thed van Leeuwen, and Emilio Delgado López-Cózar have found that, if scholars have a ResearchGate account, they can enjoy free access to 40.6% of articles that show up in Google Scholar searches. Thus, ResearchGate contributes significantly to the accessibility of scientific findings, since scholarly papers available immediately upon publication from publishers in one of Open Access formats, such as Gold or hybrid Open Access, only account for 23.1% of all indexed articles, whereas Green Open Access, involving paywall-based or otherwise restricted access for between 1 and 2 years, covers the access terms of solely 17.6% of publications. In other words, as this study indicates, the contribution of ResearchGate to article accessibility over and above what can be reached via Open Access options varies from 31.5% to 37%, even though the percentage of articles freely accessible via ResearchGate from Google Scholar stood at 31.2% in 2014. In other words, it can be inferred that in recent years scientist have increased both their usage of ResearchGate and their adoption of Open Access, even though differences remain. This is supported by the findings of Alberto Martín-Martín et al. which show that at present ResearchGate is a social network for scientists with the largest number of freely accessible documents stored at its servers estimated to amount to 738,574. For only 32.7% of these documents ResearchGate acts as an exclusive provider of free access. This indicates that ResearchGate is not in competition with Open Access, but is likely to complement its different models. Moreover, as this study shows, globally, the adoption of Open or free Access, across its formats, continues to be uneven in various academic fields, while ranging from 14.2% of all Google Scholar articles for literature to 93.6% for multidisciplinary research areas. Recent numbers also point to higher rates of adoption of Open and gratis Access for natural and exact sciences, which range from 46.3% to 87.6% of Google Scholar papers, than in other academic areas. Country-level disparities have also been found to exist for articles available from publishers via either Open Access or free access. In 2014, researchers in England, Sweden, Brazil and Scotland have published more than 35% their articles in Open or free Access available from publishers. By contrast, for articles published in 2014, Open Access repositories have provided access to more than 15% of documents in Belgium, England, France, United States and Scotland...."

Link:

https://openscience.com/while-global-data-on-open-access-show-consistency-across-databases-significant-cross-country-differences-remain/

From feeds:

[IOI] Open Infrastructure Tracking Project » Items tagged with oa.google_scholar in Open Access Tracking Project (OATP)
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » ab1630's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.access oa.surveys oa.business_models oa.europe oa.latin_america oa.surveys oa.south oa.researchgate oa.north_america oa.new oa.metrics oa.latin_america oa.google_scholar oa.europe oa.business_models oa.access

Date tagged:

05/30/2018, 13:32

Date published:

05/30/2018, 09:34