The Booming of Open Access Publications in Science

Abstract

The last decade has witnessed a significant growth of open access (OA) publications. OA is believed to be able to greatly accelerate the production and dissemination of knowledge. Backed by dominant research funders across the world, it has fundamentally changed the landscape of scholarly publishing. Web of Science started to provide identifiers for articles from OA journals in 2014, offering an opportunity to explore the development of publications generated from the OA publishing model. This study uses the Web of Science-Science Citation Index Expanded (WoS-SCIE) to illustrate the trajectories of OA publications in science. We found that the number and proportion of OA publications rose dramatically during 2006-2014. English, Portuguese and Spanish have been the dominating languages in OA journals. Geographically, while the USA has been the largest producer of OA publications, the share of OA publications within the USA has been much lower than the world average. Emerging countries such as Brazil, India and China have been very active in promoting OA publishing. We believe our observation is just a tip of the iceberg of the booming of OA publications, which implies a necessity for all stakeholders to refine their strategies to cope with this trend.

Keywords: open access, language distribution, geographical distribution