Scientific research articles are now more accessible according to a study published today in PLoS ONE. The study analyzes the share of recently published peer reviewed articles which are openly available on the net.
A team of researchers led by professor Bo-Christer Björk from the Hanken School of Economics studied a random sample of 1.2 million peer reviewed articles published in 2008 and found that 20.4 of these articles were freely available in full text. 8.5 % were available at the publishers' sites in full, delayed or selective article-level open access journals. An additional 11.9 % of titles could be found as free manuscript versions either in subject specific repositories such as PubMed Central (Medicine) or arXiv (Physics), in repositories of individual universities or on the home pages of the authors.
Chemistry (13 %) had the lowest overall share of OA, Earth Sciences (33%) the highest. In medicine and biochemistry publishing in OA journals was more common, due to the availability of suitable OA journals and access to funding for author charges. In fields such as engineering, physics, mathematics, social sciences and humanities author-posted manuscript copies dominated the picture.
To read more about Dr. Bo-Christer Björk's research please read the freely available manuscript which can be found here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0011273
Funding: The research reported in this article was carried out in the OA-barometer 2009 study, a one-year project funded by the Nordbib research and development programme (http://www.nordbib.net/). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Contact
Bo-Christer Björk
15.6.2010
Bo-Christer.Bjork@hanken.fi
Journal
PLoS ONE