{"id":478,"date":"2013-08-28T11:24:21","date_gmt":"2013-08-28T14:24:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/?p=478"},"modified":"2015-09-17T12:04:01","modified_gmt":"2015-09-17T15:04:01","slug":"open-access-articles-are-here-to-stay-in-less-than-10-years-nearly-50-of-articles-worldwide-can-be-accessed-this-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/2013\/08\/28\/open-access-articles-are-here-to-stay-in-less-than-10-years-nearly-50-of-articles-worldwide-can-be-accessed-this-way\/","title":{"rendered":"Open access articles are here to stay: in less than 10 years nearly 50% of articles worldwide can be accessed this way"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"OpenWhen embarking on a long journey, arriving at the half-way point of the trip has, more than anything, a deep psychological impact \u2013 it is a significant milestone on the way; we feel inside that from this moment we are now not \u201con the way\u201d but rather \u201cwe are arriving\u201d.<\/p>\n

During the 1990\u2019s, a movement began in various prestigious universities worldwide to make their publications freely available as a way of democratizing the results of research. In 1998, SciELO emerged as a pioneering pilot project in this area with only 10 journals at its disposal with none of them coming from \u201cthe first world \u201d (Packer, 2009). This took place a number of years before the Open Society\u2019s famous Budapest Declaration, the Berlin conferences and other initiatives in this regard. Ten journals seemed like nothing, when commercial journal publishers produce many thousands of subscription based journals.<\/p>\n

Fifteen years have passed since then and it is logical to ask how far we have come along the road. The question we have is: \u201cAre we still on the way or have we begun to reach our destination\u201c?<\/p>\n

\"Science-Metrix\"<\/a>In a recent publication produced by \u00c9ric Archambault of the company Science-Metrix, with the sponsorship of the European Commission1<\/sup>, we are told that in April 2013, 50% of academic articles published worldwide between 2004 and 2011 are available via open access.<\/p>\n

\"European<\/a>This figure has been called into question by other researchers in this field, such as Fred Dylla, the Director of the American Institute of Physics based in College Park, Maryland, and Stevan Harnad, an early supporter of open access, of the University of Quebec, in Montreal, according to articles written by both men in the journals Science\u00a02<\/sup> and Nature\u00a03<\/sup>. The team of researchers directed by Stevan Harnad estimates that the figure for open access journals available in 2011 is 32%. These differences in results could be explained for various reasons.<\/p>\n

Firstly, Harnad\u2019s team used a sample of 20,000 articles published in 2008 and taken from the Thomson-Reuters Web of Science (WoS) database, whereas Archambault\u2019s team used Scopus which offered a greater coverage, supplementing this with Google Search and other search engines. In the end, Science-Metrix expanded the sample to some 320,000 articles for the period 2004 \u2013 2011.<\/p>\n

Secondly, there are different channels through which research output can be made available through open access. Journals which form part of the Web of Science offer but one channel. Other channels also include repositories such as arXiv and PubMed Central, sites allowing authors to auto-archive their work, and academic networks such as ResearchGate.<\/p>\n

It must also be taken into account that there are at least five different variations of what can be thought of as open access publishing:<\/p>\n