The State of Open Access: Some New Data

[Richard Poynder]

On the day it was announced that scholar-founded for-profit academic software firm bepress was being acquired by Elsevier for an estimated £100 million, a preprint was posted on PeerJ reporting on a study into the current state of open access.

 

The PeerJ preprint is interesting in a number of ways, not least because it includes data from users of Unpaywall, a browser plug-in that identifies papers that researchers are looking for, and then checks to see whether those papers are available for free anywhere on the Web. Unpaywall is based on oaDOI, a tool that scours the web for open-access full-text versions of journal articles.

 

Both Unpaywall and oaDOI were developed by Impactstory, a scholar-founded non-profit open source, web-based tool developer focused on open-access issues in science. Two of the authors of the PeerJ preprint – Heather Piwowar and Jason Priem – founded Impactstory. They also wrote the Unpaywall and oaDOI software.

 

The new study could be said to offer both good news and less good news. The good news is that it estimates that 28% of the scholarly literature (19 million articles) is now OA, and growing, and that for recent articles this percentage rises to 45%. Also good news is that the authors estimate OA articles receive 18% more citations than average.

 

The less good news is that a large number of the OA papers located in the study are available on a free-to-read basis on publishers’ websites without an explicit open licence – a form of open access the study authors refer to as Bronze OA. As such, the OA status of these papers could be lost in the future. It also means that they are not licensed for reuse – which many OA advocates believe ought to be a given with open access.

 

A Q&A with Heather Piwowar is available here:

 

http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/the-state-of-open-access-some-new.html