JOINThe STM Open Access Dashboard
The scholarly publishing industry is transforming. More than 30% of all scholarly articles globally are now published as open access. Publishers have been driving this change by rapidly increasing the opportunity to publish open access, entering into Transformative Agreements, collaborations and initiatives that support Open Science.
This dashboard illustrates that it is the gold model that is driving progress in the journey toward full Open Access. STM has compiled this data to provide an accurate resource for all those seeking to learn more about open access and the publishing industry.
The percentage of journal articles, reviews and conference papers available via subscription has fallen by 23% in ten years while the percentage of articles available via the gold model has increased by 24%. The year-on-year growth average for all publications from 2011 to 2021 is 4% while the rate of growth for publications available via subscription is just 1%. Publications available via the green (subscription-supported) model grew by an average of 3% and bronze* by 4%, just about keeping pace with the overall rate of growth in publications. In contrast, gold maintained an average year-on-year growth rate of 22%.
Gold is the dominant model of open access publishing, granting immediate public access to millions of articles, constituting 31% of all scholarly articles, reviews and conference papers globally in 2021. It has been widely embraced by scholarly publishers because it represents a sustainable means to deliver publishing services and thus maintain the integrity and quality of research articles. This chart illustrates that the opportunity to publish via the gold model globally has increased by 26%, in terms of share of output, since 2011, while the ‘subscription only’ model has receded by 50%.
Publishing model uptake for Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) disciplines shows little variation from the global picture due to being a substantially larger disciplinary sector than Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). STM disciplines represent 91% and SSH just 9% of global journal articles, reviews and conference papers of 2021 within this dataset. While having a higher percentage of articles available via subscription compared to STM, perhaps due to differences in the availability of funding and the requirements attached, SSH shows the same decline in subscription articles, having fallen by 23% over the decade for both disciplines.
Authors based in China and the USA currently produce the most journal articles globally. In 2021, articles, reviews and conference papers authored in China accounted for 20% of global output and the USA, 12%. The gold model shows growth across all top article-producing countries, in terms of where corresponding authors are based, globally and is now the most frequently applied model for ten of them (including subscription).
In combination, the open access output of the top 25 global funders has shown a clear and increasing preference for the gold model since 2016. Some public funding bodies have policies that prescribe that an article must be open access and may even specify the publishing route to be taken. For many of the funders shown, most publications are now open access and the opportunity to make a publication open access via the gold route has become increasingly available.
Read and Publish and Publish and Read agreements between institutions’ libraries and publishers are transforming the licensing of subscription journals to open access, and hence are termed Transformative Agreements. These agreements provide support for journals to transition from subscription or hybrid to fully open access once most of their articles become funded to become open. The rapid growth of such agreements across the globe has supported growth in the number of publications made open access. This chart illustrates the rapid growth in these agreements under which the number of publications jumped by 966% between 2018 and 2020.
The models available for books and monographs are different to those represented for journal articles, reviews and conference papers in the charts above because the hybrid model makes it possible for one chapter in a book to be open access while another, in the same book, is not. For this reason, we provide statistics for whole books, inclusive of monographs, and book chapters separately.
Open access has had less of an impact on the scholarly books market in comparison to the journals market but there is a clear drop in the percentage of non-open access whole books from 90% of total output in 2011 to 82% in 2021. It is important to consider that, because they are much longer than an article, scholarly books undergo a far more intensive publication process. Open Access books and monographs are also served by fewer funder policies and funds in comparison to journals.
Model categorisations
| *Bronze is a commonly used categorisation of open access publishing, but such publications may have limited or unclear reuse rights or be available only for a limited time. Some of these publications may have licenses that would be considered an “open license” and others may not. Therefore, some of these articles might be considered gold if they had more complete metadata, while others may not meet the commonly accepted definitions of open access, such as the declaration of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read/). Bronze, therefore, represents those publications that are generally made free-to-read on the publisher’s website and as such are supported by purchases (eg. subscriptions to the journal in which they are published) and so depend on a sustainable business model. |
| Gold open access publishing is a route where the final published version of an article (a Version of Record) is freely and permanently available online immediately on publication for anyone, anywhere to read. Re-use depends on the license applied to the article. An Article Publishing Charge (APC) normally applies. We have included articles, reviews and conference papers that have been published in a hybrid journal via the gold model in this category. |
| Green (Subscription-supported) open access is a route to provide access to an article or monograph where an Author’s Original Manuscript or Accepted Manuscript is shared online or self-archived in a repository, often following an embargo period. The publication is generally supported by purchases (e.g. subscriptions to the journal in which they are published), and so depends on a sustainable subscription business model. In general, to support a sustainable business model the publisher retains an Exclusive License to Publish (sometimes for a limited time) through an agreement with the author, either through a copyright transfer or other license agreement. |