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Cited by 117scientometrics and bibliometrics researchAcademic Publishing and Open AccessPublishing and Scholarly Communication

Proportion of Open Access Papers Published in Peer-Reviewed Journals at the European and World Levels—1996–2013

Open access
Archambault, Éric, Amyot, Didier, Deschamps, Philippe, Nicol, Aurore, Provencher, Françoise, Rebout, Lise, Roberge, Guilaume·2014·Science-Metrix
DOI 10.5281/zenodo.10030609
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Abstract

This study report assesses the free availability of scholarly publications during the 1996 to 2013 period. It is the largest scale measurement of open access availability performed to date: a sample of one-quarter of a million records was used to study the historical evolution of open access (OA) between 1996 and 2013 and a larger, one million records sample was used to perform an in-depth assessment of the proportion and scientific impact of OA between 2008 and 2013 in different types of OA, for different scientific fields of knowledge, and for 44 countries, the EU28, ERA, and the world. Compared to previous studies done on the availability of OA, the present study presents the following characteristics: (1) it used the Scopus database, which currently covers a broader range of journals from various countries and scientific disciplines than other comprehensive databases; (2) it uses a simple definition of OA—freely available online to all (no money had to be paid, no registration to a service or website had to be made); (3) it used huge samples to maximise statistical precision; (4) it made careful and extensive efforts to harvest papers wherever they could be downloaded for free, without restriction, rather than restricting the approach to a search engine (in order to obtain a high 'recall' rate, that is, the capacity to retrieve a large part of the relevant records, while, in addition, carefully minimising the number of false records collected (that is, the approach maximised retrieval precision); and (5) it carefully characterised the strengths and weaknesses of the measurement instrument in order to apply a correction that would provide a truer measure based on an Adjusted OA score. This study also provided a series of rational definitions of access, open access, and ideal open access. The definitions provided examine aspects such as restrictions, payment, delay, transiency, and legitimacy. Because of the limited means (time and budget) available for this project, it was necessary to use operational definitions of OA which do not provide all the details one may wish to obtain. Though it was easy to obtain a clear and easily operational definition of Gold OA by stating that it referred to papers published in Gold OA journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, defining and measuring Green OA was more challenging. The operational definition restricted Green OA to researchers' self-archived papers in institutional and some thematic repositories listed in OpenDOAR and ROAR. This left a sizeable residual number of papers that could still be downloaded for free; these were classified as Other OA. This comprises, for example, Gold OA papers from subscription-based journals, which are made available through article processing charges (APC). Other OA also include papers available in large repositories such as PubMed Central and aggregator sites such as CiteSeerX. There are also Robin Hood OA or Rogue OA papers, that is, papers that infringe on copyrights by making them accessible to the public despite licenses that restrict them to being behind pay walls.

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  • Archambault et al. (2014) estimates that of papers published between 2011 and 2013, 12% could be retrieved from the journal website, 6% from repositories, and 31% by other mechanisms including academic social networks.

    “Archambault et al. (2014), the most comprehensive study to date, estimates that of papers published between 2011 and 2013, 12% of articles could be retrieved from the journal website, 6% from repositories, and 31% by other mechanisms (including ASNs).”

    From The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles (2018) · cites this paper as Archambault et al. (2014)

    Section 3.5 and Figure 9 divide freely available papers into Gold OA journals, Green OA institutional repositories, and Other OA; the paper also identifies ResearchGate as a source of freely available papers (Section 2.3). The citing sentence broadly reflects those categories, but recasts Gold OA journals as all papers retrievable from journal websites and repositories as only the Green OA category. Section 3.4 says Other OA also includes papers in repositories, so the stated retrieval locations are not equivalent to the paper’s categories. (LLM, conf=0.78)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

  • The automated system of Archambault et al. (2014) only misclassifies a paper as OA 1% of the time and finds about 75% of all OA papers that exist online, as per Archambault et al. (2016).

    “The automated system of Archambault et al. (2014) is very accurate—it only misclassifies a paper as OA 1% of the time, and finds about 75% of all OA papers that exist online, as per Archambault et al. (2016).”

    From The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles (2018) · cites this paper as Archambault et al. (2014)

    Table I in the “Recall” section reports 99.1% retrieval precision, consistent with about 1% of papers classified as OA being false positives. It reports 86.4% recall—not about 75%—for its calibration sample of 500 articles published in 2008. The cited paper therefore supports the precision figure but not the attributed recall figure. (LLM, conf=0.88)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

  • The date when a Green article became open is generally different from the date the article was first published, because authors often self-archive articles years after (or before) original publication (backfilling).

    “unlike publisher-hosted OA (Gold, Bronze, and Hybrid), the date when the Green article became open is generally different from the date the article was first published. Authors often self-archive articles years after (or before, in the case of preprints) their original publication, leading to so-called “backfilling” of Green stocks (Archambault et al., 2014).”

    From The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles (2018) · cites this paper as Archambault et al., 2014

    Section 3.2 says Green OA copies typically become available with considerable delays, and section 1.2 recognizes that self-archiving can occur before or after publication. The discussion accompanying Figure 3 documents backfilling of older OA papers, but does not establish that authors often self-archive years before publication or that the measured backfilling was specifically of Green OA stocks. Page numbers were not available in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.84)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

  • Archambault et al. (2014) found that the availability of papers published between 1996 and 2011 increased by 4% between April 2013 and April 2014, noting that backfilling is a significant contributor to green OA.

    “Archambault et al. (2014) also found that the availability of papers published between 1996 and 2011 increased by 4% between April 2013 and April 2014, noting that “backfilling” is a significant contributor to green OA.”

    From The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles (2018) · cites this paper as Archambault et al. (2014)

    The Figure 3 discussion reports that 700,000 papers published between 1996 and 2011 became freely available between April 2013 and April 2014, an increase of 3.9 percentage points—approximately four percentage points, not a 4% relative increase. It calls backfilling important to OA growth generally. Section 3.5 says the study had no prior baseline for Green OA, so it does not establish that backfilling was a significant contributor specifically to Green OA. (LLM, conf=0.88)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

  • Archambault et al. (2014) describe a 40% open access citation advantage in a massive sample of over one million articles using field-normalized citation rates.

    “Archambault et al. (2014) describe a 40% OACA in a massive sample of over one million articles using field-normalized citation rates.”

    From The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles (2018) · cites this paper as Archambault et al. (2014)

    Section 3.6 reports a 40.3% open-access citation advantage using the Average of Relative Citation, a field-normalized measure. But it gives a sample of 209,000 papers for that estimate, not over one million. A separate table in section 4.2 lists a world sample of 1,000,000 papers; it does not establish that the citation-advantage estimate used that sample. (LLM, conf=0.92)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

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Cites

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Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Archambault, É., Amyot, D., Deschamps, P., Nicol, A., Provencher, F., Rebout, L., & Roberge, G.
Affiliations
Science-Metrix (Canada) (CA)
ORCID
Archambault, Éric
Venue
Science-Metrix
Publisher
Science-Metrix
Published
2014-10-22
DOI
10.5281/zenodo.10030609
OpenAlex
W2299516731
Cited by
117
References
1
Citations by year
2025: 1 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 14 · 2020: 19 · 2019: 13 · 2018: 25 · 2017: 11 · 2016: 9 · 2015: 4
FWCI
7.84
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Lincoln (University of Nebraska) (acceptedVersion, cc-by)
  • Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) (cc-by)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
  • Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Information Systems and Management › Academic Publishing and Open Access
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Publishing and Scholarly Communication
Keywords
open access, gold open access, green open access, self-archiving, institutional repositories, DOAJ, OpenDOAR, Roar, Scopus, scientific impact, bibliometric indicators, European Research Area, open access policy, scholarly communication, delayed open access, transience

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