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by no means evenly spread. The UK is among the leaders in the provision of repositories: together with the US and Germany it accounts for well over a third of the global total. An analysis of leading open access journals suggests even higher levels of concentration, with over 60% of the articles published in PLoSOne and 46% of the articles in BioMed Central journals coming from those three countries.
4.8. In terms of disciplines, recent studies show marked differences in the take-up of open access publishing, and of making articles available in repositories. It has been estimated[1] that open access journals accounted in 2009 for around 14% of articles published worldwide in medicine and the bio sciences, as compared to 5% in engineering. On the other hand, the proportion of articles published that year available from repositories ranged from over 20% in physics and astronomy, and 26% in earth sciences, down to between 6% and 8% in medicine and the biosciences. These differences reflect a number of factors, including the uneven spread of open access journals in different disciplines, with a concentration in medicine and the life sciences; the availability of well-established subject-based repositories and the tradition of making pre-prints available in subjects including physics; and the uneven spread of funding for open access in different disciplines, with the Wellcome Trust and the NIH having a significant influence in medicine and the life sciences. In the humanities, where much research is undertaken without specific project funding, open access publishing has hardly taken off at all; and it is patchy in the social sciences, for similar reasons.
4.9. Hence it is important to review each of the different routes through which access is provided, in addition to the open access options.
Licensed access
4.10. As a result of the big deals negotiated between publishers and academic libraries, most researchers and others who are members of universities and other major research institutes (including those in the business sector) have online access to significant proportions of the licensed literature. It is important to note, however, that while access, printing and downloading is allowed for non-commercial research and private study, copyright restrictions mean that it is typically not possible to copy or reproduce licensed content for other purposes. This restricts the use tools and services that might enable researchers to manipulate, organise and share information from a wide range of sources.
4.11. For staff and students in the larger and well-endowed research-led institutions, access is provided to virtually all the major journals in their fields, and on average to over 70 per cent of all the relevant journals. For those in smaller and less research-intensive institutions, without the resources to purchase access to large bundles of titles through big deals, the proportions on average are much lower. Subscription to individual titles is more common in such circumstances; but for anyone who is not a member of an institution that has purchased at least some
- ↑ Bo-Christer Bjork et al, Open Access to the Scientific Journal Literature: Situation 2009, PLoSOne, 5(6), 2010
