Source-linked AI summary
Green and Gold Open Access Percentages and Growth, by Discipline
Yassine Gargouri, Vincent Larivière, Yves Gingras, Les Carr, Stevan Harnad
TL;DR
Because subscription access limits research availability, the paper compares Green and Gold OA across disciplines using large random samples and automated Web searches. It finds that Green OA is much more prevalent and generally grows faster, while overall spontaneous growth remains slow and institutional mandates can substantially increase self-archiving.
Problem
Subscription journals limit access to subscribing institutions, motivating comparison of Green self-archiving and Gold OA-journal publishing.
Method
The study sampled articles across 14 disciplines from ISI-indexed journals and used a robot to identify OA full texts, with Gold OA counted from journal status.
Results
21% Green OA plus 2.4% Gold OA produced about 24% overall OA in the 2011 sample; Green OA exceeded Gold OA in most disciplines and drove most increases.
Takeaways & Limitations
Institutional and funder mandates can triple baseline Green OA self-archiving and support continued growth toward 100% OA.
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
Most refereed journal articles today are published in subscription journals, accessible only to subscribing institutions, hence losing considerable research impact. Making articles freely accessible online ("Open Access," OA) maximizes their impact. Articles can be made OA in two ways: by self-archiving them on the web ("Green OA") or by publishing them in OA journals ("Gold OA"). We compared the percent and growth rate of Green and Gold OA for 14 disciplines in two random samples of 1300 articles per discipline out of the 12,500 journals indexed by Thomson-Reuters-ISI using a robot that trawled the web for OA full-texts. We sampled in 2009 and 2011 for publication year ranges 1998-2006 and 2005-2010, respectively. Green OA (21.4%) exceeds Gold OA (2.4%) in proportion and growth rate in all but the biomedical disciplines, probably because it can be provided for all journals articles and does not require paying extra Gold OA publication fees. The spontaneous overall OA growth rate is still very slow (about 1% per year). If institutions make Green OA self-archiving mandatory, however, it triples percent Green OA as well as accelerating its growth rate.
Introduction
Green OA is more immediately scalable than Gold OA because it depends mainly on authors choosing to self-archive, while Gold OA faces constraints of quantity, quality, and author cost.
- Green OA has considerably more immediate scope because its main constraint is whether authors choose to self-archive.Gold OA is constrained by quantity, quality, and cost to the author.
- Among ISI-indexed journals, Green OA exceeded Gold OA in all disciplines except the life sciences.The cited comparison reported 14% Green OA versus 6.6% Gold OA for the ISI subset.
- The study updates earlier OA estimates for the ISI-indexed subset using a larger sample.
Overall OA Percentages
Across the sampled disciplines, OA percentages rose between the 2009 and 2011 assessments, with especially large increases in several fields; the earlier sample averaged about 20% OA.
- 107,052 articles from 14 disciplines were randomly sampled for 2005-2010 and assessed for Web-accessible full text in 2011.A software robot searched article metadata and achieved about 98% accuracy in hand-checked tests.
- About 20% was the overall OA average in the earlier 1998-2006 sample, rising from 14% in 1998 to 21% in 2006.
- OA grew in all disciplines between the 2009 and 2011 samples, especially in Clinical Medicine, Mathematics, Chemistry, Earth and Space Science, and Social Science.The reported increases were 3% to 14%, 34% to 45%, 6% to 11%, 27% to 38%, and 28% to 36%, respectively.
Separating Percent Gold and Green OA
In the 2011 sample of 2005–2010 articles, Green OA substantially exceeded Gold OA overall and in most disciplines. Gold OA was highest in biomedical fields, while increases in overall OA were mostly driven by Green OA.
- 21% of articles were Green OA and 2.4% were Gold OA, yielding about 24% overall OA.About 97% of the articles were published in subscription journals.
- Gold OA was lowest in Social Science (0.9%) and highest in Biomedical Research (7.9%).Clinical Medicine reached 5.1% and Health reached 4.6%.
- Gold OA remained relatively low at 1.2%–3.5% across all disciplines and publication years.Biomedical Research showed the largest increase, from 2.1% in 2005 to 8.3% in 2009.
- Green OA exceeded Gold OA in all disciplines except the biomedical disciplines.The increase in overall OA was therefore mostly attributable to Green OA.
Conclusions
Green OA has greater immediate scope for growth than Gold OA, but both its level and growth remain below their potential. The paper concludes that institutional and funder mandates can substantially increase self-archiving.
- Green OA exceeds Gold OA in percentage and growth rate in almost all disciplines.Its broader scope reflects the larger number of subscription and top journals and the absence of author fees.
- Green OA mandates almost immediately triple the baseline self-archiving rate and continue climbing toward 100% OA in later years.