JOINGold OA continues to drive open access growth as the market matures
Gold OA articles jumped to its highest share ever in 2025, accounting for 44% of all global journal articles, reviews, and conference papers published, based on the latest release of the STM Open Access Dashboard. Nearly two million research articles were published gold OA in 2025, making it the principal driver of immediate, freely available access to research.
The Dashboard monitors the uptake of routes to OA from 2015 to 2025. Gold OA has quadrupled over the last decade. Publishers now offer gold OA publishing options for 84% of the world’s research articles, reflecting sustained investment in expanded pathways to OA, new business models including Transformative Agreements, and other collaborations and partnerships supporting open science. Transformative agreements alone enabled more than 338,000 publications to be made openly available in 2025, helping to make OA options available at scale across disciplines and regions. Gold OA is also available for roughly 84% of both STM and social sciences and humanities publications, closing a longstanding disciplinary gap. In 2025, 45% of social sciences and humanities articles were published through gold OA, slightly exceeding the proportion for STM disciplines at 44%.
Publication trends suggest that OA has moved from a period of rapid expansion to a more mature phase of growth. While gold OA continues to grow substantially faster than subscription-only publishing, rapid growth in research output from countries such as China and India means that gains in OA uptake are offset by continued growth in subscription-only publishing. This changing geography of research is reshaping the overall market.
“This latest data shows how a decade of investment by publishers, institutions and funders has expanded opportunities to publish openly, driven uptake across disciplines, and helped make immediate access to the Version of Record a mainstream reality for researchers around the world. As OA enters a more mature phase, maintaining progress will require sustained investment and collaboration that support not just access but maintain the quality assurance, stewardship and integrity that underpin trusted research.” — Caroline Sutton, CEO, STM