We are excited to announce our most recent study has just been posted on bioRxiv:

Piwowar, Priem, Orr (2019) The Future of OA: A large-scale analysis projecting Open Access publication and readership. bioRxiv: https://doi.org/10.1101/795310

This is the largest, most comprehensive analysis ever to predict the future of Open Access. Importantly, we look not only at publication trends but also at *viewership* — what do people want to read, and how much of it is OA?

The abstract is included below, we’ll be highlighting a few of the cool findings in subsequent blog posts, and you can read the full paper here (DOI not resolving yet). All the raw data and code is available, as is our style: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3474007. Enjoy, and let us know what you think!

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Understanding the growth of open access (OA) is important for deciding funder policy, subscription allocation, and infrastructure planning.

This study analyses the number of papers available as OA over time. The models includes both OA embargo data and the relative growth rates of different OA types over time, based on the OA status of 70 million journal articles published between 1950 and 2019.

The study also looks at article usage data, analyzing the proportion of views to OA articles vs views to articles which are closed access. Signal processing techniques are used to model how these viewership patterns change over time. Viewership data is based on 2.8 million uses of the Unpaywall browser extension in July 2019.

We found that Green, Gold, and Hybrid papers receive more views than their Closed or Bronze counterparts, particularly Green papers made available within a year of publication. We also found that the proportion of Green, Gold, and Hybrid articles is growing most quickly.

In 2019:

• 31% of all journal articles are available as OA
• 52% of all article views are to OA articles

Given existing trends, we estimate that by 2025:

• 44% of all journal articles will be available as OA
• 70% of all article views will be to OA articles

The declining relevance of closed access articles is likely to change the landscape of scholarly communication in the years to come.

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Additional blog posts about this paper:

• New perspective for OA: Date of Observation
• The Future of OA: what did we find
• Green OA lag
• likely more to come 🙂