A recent survey published in PLoS ONE, a peer-reviewed online publication of open access (OA) publisher Public Library of Science (PLoS), reveals that one in five research papers published in 2008 are currently available for free on the Internet.
Bo-Christer Bjork and colleagues at the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, Finland, manually checked the availability of 1837 articles, randomly sampled from 1.2 million articles in the Scopus database from Elsevier. Of articles published in 2008, 8.5 percent were freely available at the publishers' websites. An additional 11.9 percent free manuscript versions could be found on authors' websites or in repositories. Forty Three percent of them could be found in subject-based repositories such as PubMed and ArXiv.
Breaking down the articles by discipline, it was found that with 33 percent, earth sciences had the highest overall OA share, while chemistry had the lowest with 13 percent. The researchers also found that in the life sciences area, majority of OA articles were gold - free at publishers' websites. But in other disciplines, most of the OA articles were green - only available on authors' websites or in repositories.
The study is available online at http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0011273.
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