Lab life. A wind of freedom is blowing through the world of scientific publishing: more and more research articles are accessible without paying (or open access, according to the accepted English term). Yes but how much? The answer is not obvious, because even the number of scientific articles published each year is poorly known!
To see more clearly, a team from the University of Montreal, in Canada, associated with Georgia Tech, in the United States, immersed themselves in two rather different collections of articles, as they explain in PLOS One of March 31. The first platform, Web of Science, incorporated in the 1960s and owned by Clarivate, registers some 3.5 million articles a year. The second, Dimensionsfrom the company Digital Science, born in 2018, rather harvests 6 million, thanks to a wider net, which picks up non-English-speaking newspapers or from developing countries… The first is known to be of excellent quality in terms of author names, affiliations…, while the second has more “holes” in its metadata.
There are several ways to publish freely, referred to by names like “green”, “golden”, “hybrid”, “bronze”, which correspond to different business models
First observation. Somewhat to the researchers’ surprise, the percentage of articles in open access is quite close, 43.3% for Web of Science and 46.6% for Dimensions between 2015 and 2019.
Second observation, the comparison reveals fractures between the scientific “first division” (North America, Europe, Asia) and the second (Africa, South America). Dimensions gives higher percentages of use of open access than Web of Science for South America (+ 36.6%) or sub-Saharan Africa (+ 12.4%). “This shows that we underestimate the share of open access, if we only look at databases that favor major Anglo-Saxon scientific journals, such as Web of Science », underlines Vincent Larivière, professor at the University of Montreal, co-author of the study. He thus cites the newspapers of the Portuguese publisher SciELO, not very present in Web of Sciencewhile they are renowned for Portuguese-speaking researchers.
Different business models
This divide between countries can also be seen, third observation, if we plunge into the very rich jungle of open access. There are indeed several ways to publish freely, designated by names like “green”, “golden”, “hybrid”, “bronze”, which correspond to different economic models. Indeed, for an article to be free to read, someone has to pay. This may be the researcher’s employer through publication fees paid to the journal (golden or hybrid model – if the journal also keeps articles accessible by subscription). Or public institutions which make servers available for depositing articles (green model) or which finance newspapers (diamond model)… Bronze designates a vague category where the article is accessible but without the mention of the license of use, so it might not stay free forever. “We must not suggest that open access means that the author must pay”recalls Vincent Larivière.
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