Group items tagged

"'We basically took a sample of 320,000 papers from various databases and developed "harvester" software to look for the availability of articles,' says Science-Metrix CEO Éric Archambault. 'If it was able to download a paper it would classify it as a free article.' The software searched papers across different disciplines, published between 2001 and 2011 in Europe, Brazil, Canada, Japan and the US. The sample included material from online databases, such as Scopus and PubMed, as well as the websites of publishers, institutions and researchers. Over 40% of peer-reviewed articles published worldwide over the whole 10-year period could be downloaded for free, and for 2011 alone this figure rose to around 50%. The report's estimates are significantly higher than those generated by similar studies, most of which put the proportion of published papers that are open access in the region of 20-30%."