Scientific research articles are now more accessible according to a study published today in PLoS ONE. The study analyzes the share of recently published peer reviewed articles which are openly available on the net. Thankfully, the current study is itself an open access article so be sure to check the end of this report to download the full text article.
A team of researchers led by professor Bo-Christer Björk from the Hanken School of Economics studied a random sample of 1.2 million peer reviewed articles published in 2008 and found that 20.4% of these articles were freely available in full text. 8.5 % were available at the publishers’ sites in full, delayed, or selective article-level open access journals.
An additional 11.9% of titles could be found as free manuscript versions either in subject specific repositories such as PubMed Central (Medicine) or arXiv (Physics), in repositories of individual universities or on the home pages of the authors.
Chemistry (13%) had the lowest overall share of OA, Earth Sciences (33%) the highest. In medicine and biochemistry publishing in OA journals was more common, due to the availability of suitable OA journals and access to funding for author charges. In fields such as engineering, physics, mathematics, social sciences and humanities author-posted manuscript copies dominated the picture.
Material adapted from Public Library of Science by CFisher.
Download/Reference
Björk B-C, Welling P, Laakso M, Majlender P, Hedlund T, et al. (2010). Open Access to the Scientific Journal Literature: Situation 2009. PLoS ONE 5(6).
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