Global Open Access Slowly Growing, Study Finds

One in five scientific papers is now available freely on the internet, the first global study of research papers across all disciplines has found. Researchers looked at global data for research papers published in 2008: almost nine per cent were freely available on publishers' sites ('gold' access) and another 12 per cent on authors' or departmental websites ('green' access),

Chemistry papers were least likely to be freely available, with only 13 per cent open access, while Earth Sciences papers were the most likely to be free — with one in three open access. Latin American and Indian publications were more likely than average to be freely available "because of the availability of open access platforms [there]", said Bo-Christer Björk, lead author based at the Hanken School of Economics in Finland.

But he added that Chinese articles were under-represented in part because of the difficulties of finding them on the search engine, Google. There have been few comprehensive studies tracking the extent of open access archiving. A 2009 survey published in Information Research by the same team put the proportion of open access papers in 2006 at around 19 per cent.