From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2017 18:43:21 +0100

On the day it was announced that scholar-founded for-profit academic
software firm bepress was being acquired by Elsevier for an estimated
£100 million, a preprint was posted on PeerJ reporting on a study into
the current state of open access.

The PeerJ preprint is interesting in a number of ways, not least
because it includes data from users of Unpaywall, a browser plug-in
that identifies papers that researchers are looking for, and then
checks to see whether those papers are available for free anywhere on
the Web. Unpaywall is based on oaDOI, a tool that scours the web for
open-access full-text versions of journal articles.

Both Unpaywall and oaDOI were developed by Impactstory, a
scholar-founded non-profit open source, web-based tool developer
focused on open-access issues in science. Two of the authors of the
PeerJ preprint – Heather Piwowar and Jason Priem – founded
Impactstory. They also wrote the Unpaywall and oaDOI software.

The new study could be said to offer both good news and less good
news. The good news is that it estimates that 28% of the scholarly
literature (19 million articles) is now OA, and growing, and that for
recent articles this percentage rises to 45%. Also good news is that
the authors estimate OA articles receive 18% more citations than
average.

The less good news is that a large number of the OA papers located in
the study are available on a free-to-read basis on publishers’
websites without an explicit open licence – a form of open access the
study authors refer to as Bronze OA. As such, the OA status of these
papers could be lost in the future. It also means that they are not
licensed for reuse – which many OA advocates believe ought to be a
given with open access.

A Q&A with Heather Piwowar is available here:

http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/the-state-of-open-access-some-new.html