Abstract
The proportion of research outputs published in open access journals or made available on other freely-accessible platforms has increased over the past two decades, driven largely by funder mandates, institutional policies, grass-roots advocacy, and changing attitudes in the research community. However, the relative effectiveness of these different interventions has remained largely unexplored. Here we present a robust, transparent and updateable method for analysing how these interventions affect the open access performance of individual institutes. We studied 1,207 institutions from across the world, and found that, in 2017, the top-performing universities published around 80-90% of their research open access. The analysis also showed that publisher-mediated (gold) open access was popular in Latin American and African universities, whereas the growth of open access in Europe and North America has mostly been driven by repositories.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Curtin University of Technology
- Chun-Kai Huang
- Cameron Neylon
- Richard Hosking
- Lucy Montgomery
- Katie S Wilson
- Alkim Ozaygen
- Chloe Brookes-Kenworthy
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Julia Deathridge, eLife, United Kingdom
Publication history
- Received: March 20, 2020
- Accepted: September 11, 2020
- Accepted Manuscript published: September 14, 2020 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: October 5, 2020 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2020, Huang et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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