Here are some of the key findings from the recent preprint on the Future of OA:

• By 2025 we predict that 70% of all article views will be to articles available as OA — only 30% of article view attempts will be to content available only via subscription.
  • This compares to 52% of views available as OA right now, so it’ll be a big change in the next five years.
• The numbers of Green, Gold, and Hybrid articles have been growing exponentially, and growing faster than Delayed OA or Closed access articles:
  • articles by year of observation, with exponential best fit line:

• The average Green, Gold, and Hybrid paper receives more views than its Closed or Bronze counterpart, particularly Green papers made available within a year of publication.
  • views per article, by age of article:

• Most Green OA articles become OA within their first two years of publication, but there is a long tail.
  • articles made newly Green OA in each the last four years, histograms by year of publication:

• One interesting realization from the modeling we’ve done is that when the proportion of papers that are OA increases, or when the OA lag decreases, the total number of views increase — the scholarly literature becomes more heavily viewed and thus more valuable to society. This is intuitive, but could be explored quantitatively in future work using this model or ones like it.

Anyway, there are more findings too, but those are some of the main ones.