Anatomy of open access publishing: a study of longitudinal development and internal structure

BMC Medicine, Oct 2012

Background Open access (OA) is a revolutionary way of providing access to the scholarly journal literature made possible by the Internet. The primary aim of this study was to measure the volume of scientific articles published in full immediate OA journals from 2000 to 2011, while observing longitudinal internal shifts in the structure of OA publishing concerning revenue models, publisher types and relative distribution among scientific disciplines. The secondary aim was to measure the share of OA articles of all journal articles, including articles made OA by publishers with a delay and individual author-paid OA articles in subscription journals (hybrid OA), as these subsets of OA publishing have mostly been ignored in previous studies. Methods Stratified random sampling of journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (n = 787) was performed. The annual publication volumes spanning 2000 to 2011 were retrieved from major publication indexes and through manual data collection. Results An estimated 340,000 articles were published by 6,713 full immediate OA journals during 2011. OA journals requiring article-processing charges have become increasingly common, publishing 166,700 articles in 2011 (49% of all OA articles). This growth is related to the growth of commercial publishers, who, despite only a marginal presence a decade ago, have grown to become key actors on the OA scene, responsible for 120,000 of the articles published in 2011. Publication volume has grown within all major scientific disciplines, however, biomedicine has seen a particularly rapid 16-fold growth between 2000 (7,400 articles) and 2011 (120,900 articles). Over the past decade, OA journal publishing has steadily increased its relative share of all scholarly journal articles by about 1% annually. Approximately 17% of the 1.66 million articles published during 2011 and indexed in the most comprehensive article-level index of scholarly articles (Scopus) are available OA through journal publishers, most articles immediately (12%) but some within 12 months of publication (5%). Conclusions OA journal publishing is disrupting the dominant subscription-based model of scientific publishing, having rapidly grown in relative annual share of published journal articles during the last decade.

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Anatomy of open access publishing: a study of longitudinal development and internal structure

Mikael Laakso 0 Bo-Christer Bjrk 0 0 Hanken School of Economics , Helsinki , Finland - Background Open access (OA) has expanded the possibilities for disseminating ones own research and accessing that of others [1,2]. OA, in the context of scholarly publishing, is a term widely used to refer to unrestricted online access to articles published in scholarly journals. There are two distinct ways for scholarly articles to become available OA, either directly provided by the journal publisher (gold OA), or indirectly by being uploaded and made freely available somewhere else on the Web (green OA). Both options increase the potential readership of any article to over a billion individuals with Internet access and indirectly speed up the spread of new research ideas. While the majority of OA journals do not charge authors anything for the services provided, a growing minority of professionally operating journals charge authors fees ranging from 20 to 3800 USD, with an estimated average of 900 USD [3]. OA is closely related to developments in other media content delivery businesses, and its ethos is well aligned with the fundamental openness principle of science itself as well as the ideologies behind Wikipedia and open source software. However, what makes scientific publishing distinct is the influence journal prestige and rankings have on journal selection for authors submitting article manuscripts [4]. There are also vested interests to preserve the status quo of the current subscription market among stakeholders, with dominant publishers seeing OA as a potential threat to the bottom-line. Friction caused by these and other factors can be argued to slow down the process of OA adoption because journals are not direct substitutes for each other and subscriptionbased journal copyright agreements can prohibit parallel distribution of published content. However, following in the footsteps of the National Institutes of Health in the US, public research funders in the UK have recently launched strategies to increase OA to publicly funded research [5]. While the ultimate goal of increasing access to publicly funded research is known and widely accepted it is difficult to reach compromises that balance the longand short-term interests of the stakeholders involved [6]. Important changes in policy facilitating growth of OA happen on many levels, influencing research publishing both upstream and downstream. The examples from the public funders in the US and UK are merely the most ambitious movements so far: public and private research funders large and small, universities, publishers and research institutes all contribute to forming the evolving OA landscape. The problem that has persisted with OA since the start is the lack of readily available data for how this particular subset of journal publishing is developing over time, an aspect which is described in closer detail in the Methods section. Policymakers should have an interest in knowing how common OA is today, how fast the share of OA has increased and what proportion of journal articles are currently OA? The purpose of this study is to provide answers to these types of questions. Aim of the study This study focuses on providing measurement of the longitudinal development gold OA publication volume for the years 2000 to 2011 as a whole and by subtype: full immediate journal OA, delayed OA and hybrid OA. As will be described in more detail further on, earlier studies have mostly ignored the subset of delayed OA journals. This is partly because there is no comprehensive index of such journals similar to the service the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) provides for immediate OA journals, and partly because of the divisive acceptance of delayed OA as a valid form of OA. However, the subset of delayed OA journals is both substantial in volume and is populated with many high-quality journals; five of the 10 most-cited journals within Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge in the period from 1999 to 2009 are currently delayed OA while the others are subscription-access only [7]. Hybrid OA is the term commonly used for describing individual articles being provided openly within subscription-only journals through an optional author payment; it is only recently that this type of OA has been properly studied [8]. The chosen research aim is related to some existing areas of OA research that warrant mention to clarify the specific contribution of this study. Green OA is not part of the scope of this study as that is a wholly different research problem and one that requires its own set of methods, as different versions of articles are scattered around on the Web. Furthermore, this study does not extensively discuss or evaluate the pros or cons of OA, since there is already a well-developed body of literature focusing on issues such as relationships between OA and readership, citation or impact [9-12]. In summary, the aim is to provide comprehensive and up-to-date quantitative measurement of gold OA journals and articles. The results and data of this study can then potentially act as a foundation for more targeted research enquiries. Previous studies Researchers have applied different methods to cope with the lack of readily available quantitative data to study the OA phenomenon, ranging from labor-intensive manual article-counting [13-15] to automated Web-crawling [16,17]. What is known about the early years of OA, both gold and green, is mostly through a series of independent studies providing snapshots for individual years based on sampling various publication indexes. The fact that studies have been based around OA prevalence within different publication indexes and the diverse adopted sampling methods makes comparisons or composition of longitudinal development inexact. Nevertheless, these are the best figures currently available. The earliest comprehensive study suggests the 2003 share for gold OA to have been 2.9% for articles included in the Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge [18]. The next study was performed for the 2006 publication volume based on data from UlrichsWeb [19] and the DOAJ [20], where a gold OA share of 8.1% and a green OA share of 11.3% resulted in a combined OA share of 19.4% [14]. For 2008 articles, the Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge gold OA share was measured to be 6.6% and green OA 14%, resulting in a figure of total OA of 20.6% [21]. Also for 2008, a largescale study based on English-language journals listed in the DOAJ calculated that 120,000 articles were published OA either through full immediate OA journals or as individual hybrid OA articles [22]. The first comprehensive longitudinal study on the volume of articles published by full immediate OA journals in the DOAJ resulted in an average annual year-on-year growth rate of 30% from 2000 to 2009, with some 191,000 articles published during 2009 [13]. Another longitudinal study, including both gold and green OA, produced a total OA share of 23.1% for (...truncated)


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Mikael Laakso, Bo-Christer Björk. Anatomy of open access publishing: a study of longitudinal development and internal structure, BMC Medicine, 2012, pp. 124, 10, DOI: 10.1186/1741-7015-10-124