From: Gary Price <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, Aug 2, 2017 at 6:38 PM

New preprint written/posted to PeerJ today by several well-known researchers.

"The State of OA: A Large-Scale Analysis of the Prevalence and Impact
Of Open Access Articles"

Abstract

Despite growing interest in Open Access (OA) to scholarly literature,
there is an unmet need for large-scale, up-to-date, and reproducible
studies assessing the prevalence and characteristics of OA. We address
this need using oaDOI, an open online service that determines OA
status for 67 million articles.

We use three samples, each of 100,000 articles, to investigate OA in
three populations: 1) all journal articles assigned a Crossref DOI, 2)
recent journal articles indexed in Web of Science, and 3) articles
viewed by users of Unpaywall, an open-source browser extension that
lets users find OA articles using oaDOI.

We estimate that at least 28% of the scholarly literature is OA (19M
in total) and that this proportion is growing, driven particularly by
growth in Gold and Hybrid. The most recent year analyzed (2015) also
has the highest percentage of OA (45%). Because of this growth, and
the fact that readers disproportionately access newer articles, we
find that Unpaywall users encounter OA quite frequently: 47% of
articles they view are OA. Notably, the most common mechanism for OA
is not Gold, Green, or Hybrid OA, but rather an under-discussed
category we dub Bronze: articles made free-to-read on the publisher
website, without an explicit Open license.

We also examine the citation impact of OA articles, corroborating the
so-called open-access citation advantage: accounting for age and
discipline, OA articles receive 18% more citations than average, an
effect driven primarily by Green and Hybrid OA. We encourage further
research using the free oaDOI service, as a way to inform OA policy
and practice.

DIRECT TO FULL TEXT

https://peerj.com/preprints/3119/

https://peerj.com/preprints/3119.pdf

Note: Heather Piwowar and Jason Priem (two of the authors) are the
founders of ImpactStory and of the developers of the Unpaywall browser
add-on and oaDOI API service, both of these services can make easy
access oa articles, preprints, etc. much easier for many people.

http://oadoi.org
http://unpaywall.org/

Priem was also a co-author of the altmetrics manifesto in 2010.
http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/

Gary D. Price, MLIS
Co-Founder and Editor, Library Journal's infoDOCKET
Information Industry Analyst
Librarian

http://infoDOCKET.com
@infodocket