Evidence of open access of scientific publications in Google Scholar: A large-scale analysis

Abstract

This article uses Google Scholar (GS) as a source of data to analyse Open Access (OA) levels across all countries and fields of research. All articles and reviews with a DOI and published in 2009 or 2014 and covered by the three main citation indexes in the Web of Science (2,269,022 documents) were selected for study. The links to freely available versions of these documents displayed in GS were collected. To differentiate between more reliable (sustainable and legal) forms of access and less reliable ones, the data extracted from GS was combined with information available in DOAJ, CrossRef, OpenDOAR, and ROAR. This allowed us to distinguish the percentage of documents in our sample that are made OA by the publisher (23.1%, including Gold, Hybrid, Delayed, and Bronze OA) from those available as Green OA (17.6%), and those available from other sources (40.6%, mainly due to ResearchGate). The data shows an overall free availability of 54.6%, with important differences at the country and subject category levels. The data extracted from GS yielded very similar results to those found by other studies that analysed similar samples of documents, but employed different methods to find evidence of OA, thus suggesting a relative consistency among methods.

Unbundling Open Access dimensions: a conceptual discussion to reduce terminology inconsistencies

“…If the documents do not meet one or more of these criteria, there is no guarantee that they will be freely accessible on the long term, and therefore they should be considered transient. For example, several studies have found that a large portion of the documents that are made freely accessible by journal publishers do not declare any kind of OA-compatible use license (Martín-Martín et al, 2018;Piwowar et al, 2018). This is a precarious situation, because even if publishers' original intention is to maintain free access status in perpetuity, as sole copyright holders nothing could stop them if they decided to revoke that status in the future.…”

Evaluating Zotero, SHERPA/RoMEO, and Unpaywall in an institutional repository workflow

“…Besides research on OA finders, studies on the effect of disciplines on OA rates are also relevant, because they can affect how many documents Unpaywall can realistically detect. In terms of the disciplines covered in the current study, recent research has broadly concluded that medicine has high rates of OA, followed by social sciences, and lastly art and humanities (Archambault, Amyot, Deschamps, Nicol, Provencher, Rebout, & Roberge, 2014;Bosman & Kramer, 2018;Martín-Martín, Costas, van Leeuwen, & López-Cózar, 2018;Piwowar, et al, 2018). OA research either placed education in the social sciences field or did not focus on the discipline.…”

We’re Still Failing to Deliver Open Access and Solve the Serials Crisis: To Succeed We Need a Digital Transformation of Scholarly Communication Using Internet-Era Principles

“…This year it is likely that the proportion of articles born-OA, globally, will not be much above the ~20% born-OA in 2017 and half the backlist will remain pay-walled (Alperin, 2018;Bosman & Kramer, 2018;Martín-Martín et al, 2018a;Piwowar et al, 2018). In 2010, the number of newly published pay-walled articles was around 0.94 million.…”

“…Why now? Perhaps librarians have been emboldened by the knowledge that subscription content only makes up half of what researchers actually access via legal channels (Piwowar et al, 2018) and otherwise their needs could be met satisfactorily by inter-library loans, preprints, plug-ins and tools that lower the effort of finding free versions of pay-walled content, and social channels like ResearchGate which hosts nearly three-quarters of a million freely accessible documents (Anderson, K. 2018a;Esposito, 2018a;National Library of Sweden, 2018;Martín-Martín et al, 2018a). Unspoken, SciHub, which being unmentionable perhaps we should refer to as the 'Scottish service' 5 , continues to harvest 85% of all paywalled articles rising to 90% if they have been cited (Himmelstein et al, 2018).…”