Growth of hybrid open access, 2009-2016.

Bo-Christer Björk

doi:10.7717/peerj.3878

Abstract

Hybrid Open Access is an intermediate form of OA, where authors pay scholarly publishers to make articles freely accessible within journals, in which reading the content otherwise requires a subscription or pay-per-view. Major scholarly publishers have in recent years started providing the hybrid option for the vast majority of their journals. Since the uptake usually has been low per journal and scattered over thousands of journals, it has been very difficult to obtain an overview of how common hybrid articles are. This study, using the results of earlier studies as well as a variety of methods, measures the evolution of hybrid OA over time. The number of journals offering the hybrid option has increased from around 2,000 in 2009 to almost 10,000 in 2016. The number of individual articles has in the same period grown from an estimated 8,000 in 2009 to 45,000 in 2016. The growth in article numbers has clearly increased since 2014, after some major research funders in Europe started to introduce new centralized payment schemes for the article processing charges (APCs).

Highlights

Ever since the emergence of the world wide web, a quarter of a century ago, academics and scholarly publishers have experimented with different forms of Open Access (OA), a radically new business model for the dissemination of research publications
As long as the authors of hybrid articles have had to secure the funding of the article processing charges (APCs) from either personal funds, departmental funds, or external research grants, the uptake levels have remained very low for the vast majority of journals
Several leading research funders have set up centralized funds for paying APCs and secondly, a new type of consortial electronic subscription licenses which include the payment of hybrid APCs has stated to emerge

Summary

Introduction

Ever since the emergence of the world wide web, a quarter of a century ago, academics and scholarly publishers have experimented with different forms of Open Access (OA), a radically new business model for the dissemination of research publications. OA can be provided with no charges to the authors and their institutions, or publishing charges can be levied to fund the publication. The abbreviation for such charges is APC, which can be interpreted as article processing or article publication charge. In addition to the articles themselves being made OA by the publishers (gold OA), it is possible that the authors legally upload manuscript copies to institutional or subject-specific repositories (green OA). As with many other types of web content, illegal copies can be found for many articles behind subscription paywalls

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