Open access status of journals and articles in Journal Citation Reports

Abstract

Purpose: There is somewhat of a difference between understanding the open access (OA) concept and practicing it by stakeholders. OA articles are mainly published by gold and hybrid OA journals, but the OA status may be confusing depending on the target databases. This study investigated the OA status of journals and articles and evaluated the extent to which OA2020 (publishing 90% of articles as OA) was achieved. Methods: This study collected OA data by combining 2014-2019 data from Journal Citation Reports at the journal level with Web of Science at the article level. Finally, 12,449 journals were analyzed focusing on gold and hybrid OA journals, and progress towards the goal of OA2020 was evaluated. Results: Even though 80.4% of Journal Citation Reports journals were gold and hybrid OA journals, only 20.9% of the articles were OA (gold OA journals, 16.6%; hybrid journals, 4.3%). The compound annual growth rate of the total articles was 4.7%, that of OA articles was 16.4%, and that of subscription articles was only 1.7%. Among the subscription journals, 77.4% had shifted to become hybrid journals, but only 5.2% of their articles were OA. Therefore, the hybrid journals were at the very early stage of OA publishing. Conclusion: Considerable progress must still be made to achieve the goal of OA2020. The influence of OA publishing will eventually expand and therefore, librarians should take interest in OA publishing for the library services.