Page:Finch Group report.pdf/33

 subscription-based journal accessible immediately on publication, without any reader having to pay a subscription or PPV charge.

3.40. The proportion of the global total of articles published each year which are published in open access or hybrid journals is not easy to calculate. A recent study estimated that over 190,000 articles were published in open access journals in 2009, about 7.7% of all peer-reviewed journal articles published that year. The EU-funded Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP) estimated a slightly higher 8-10% of all peer-reviewed articles were published open access. Such figures should be set in the context where the total number of articles in all kinds of peer-reviewed journals worldwide is rising at the rate of around 4% a year.

3.41. Most publishers providing fully open access journals operate on a small scale, with only one title, publishing fewer than one hundred articles a year. A recent study suggests that two-thirds of open access articles are published by 10% of publishers, and that fourteen publishers are responsible for around 30% of open access articles. Science, technology and medicine account for two-thirds of journals and more than three-quarters of articles. Social science and humanities, on the other hand, account for a third of journals but only 16% of articles.

3.42. Take-up of the open access option in hybrid journals is relatively low, at around 2% on average. Some publishers have seen higher levels of take-up in certain disciplines: Oxford Journals have seen 10% of authors in the life sciences selecting the open access option across 16 participating journals, as against approximately 5% in medicine and public health and 3% in the humanities and social sciences. Nature Communications reports take-up of the open access option at over 40%.

3.43. Overall, recent studies suggest that the growth of open access articles has been much faster than for peer-reviewed articles as a whole. This has been the result both of the creation of new ‘born open access’ journals and the switch of established journals either to open access or to the hybrid model. The recent development of what have been termed ‘repository’ journals such as PLoSOn—where the peer review process focuses solely on whether the findings and