open access

Elsevier becomes newest customer of Unpaywall Data Feed

We’re pleased to announce that Elsevier has become the newest customer of Impactstory’s Unpaywall Data Feed, which provides a weekly feed of changes in Unpaywall, our open database of 20 million open access articles. Elsevier will use the Unpaywall database to make open access content easier to find on Scopus.

Elsevier joins Clarivate Analytics, Digital Science, Zotero, and many other organizations as paying subscribers to the Data Feed.  Paying subscribers provide sustainability for Unpaywall, and fund the many free ways to access Unpaywall data, including complete database snapshots as well as our open API, Simple Query Tool, and browser extension. We’re proud that thousands of academic libraries and other institutions, as well as over 150,000 individual extension users, are using these free tools.

Impactstory’s mission is to help all people access all research products. Adding Elsevier as a Data Feed customer helps us further that mission. Specifically, the new agreement injects OA from our index into the workflows of the many Scopus users worldwide, helping them find and use open research they may never have seen before. So, we’re happy to welcome Elsevier as our latest Data Feed customer.

When will everything be Open Access?

OA continues to grow. But when will it be…done? When will everything be published as Open Access?

Using data from our recently-published PeerJ OA study, we took a crack at answering that question. This data we’re using comes from the Unpaywall database–now the largest open database of OA articles ever created, with comprehensive data on over 90 million articles. Check out the paper for more lots more details on how we assembled the data, along with assessments of accuracy and other goodies. But without further ado, here’s our projection of OA growth:

growth-over-time

In the study, we found that OA is increasingly likely for newer articles since around 1990. That’s the solid line part of the graph, and is based on hard data.

But since the curve is so regular, it was tempting to extend it so see what would happen at the current rate of increase. That’s the dotted line in the figure above. Of course it’s a pretty facile projection, in that no effort has been made to model the underlying processes. #limitations #futurework 😀. Moreover, the 2040 number is clearly too conservative since it doesn’t account for discontinuities–like the surge in OA we’ll see in 2020 when new European mandates take effect.

But while the dates can’t be known for certain, what the data makes very clear is that we are headed for an era of universal OA. It’s not a question of if, but when. And that’s great news.

Bringing article fulltext to your Impactstory profile

Your work’s impact helps define your identity as a scientist; that’s why we’re so excited about being the world’s most complete impact profile. But of course the content of your work is a key part of your identity, too.

This week, we’re launching a feature that’ll bring that content to your Impactstory profile: if there’s a free fulltext version of one of your articles, we’ll find it and automatically link to it from your profile.

We’ll be automatically checking tons of places to find where an article’s freely available:

  • Is the article in PMC?
  • Is it published in a journal listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals?
  • Is it published in a journal considered “open access” by Mendeley?
  • Does PubMed LinkOut to a free and full-text resource version?
  • If it’s in none of these, is it in our custom-built list of other open sources (including arXiv, figshare, and others)?

Of course, even with all these checks, we’re going to miss some sources–especially self-archiving in institutional repositories. So we’ll be improving our list over time, and you’ll be able to easily add your own linkouts when we miss them.

We’re excited to pull all this together; it’s another big step toward making your Impactstory profile a great place to share your scholarly identity online. Look for the release in a few days!