International movement of open access to scientific knowledge: A quantitative analysis of country involvement

Abstract

The study aims are to conduct a systematic quantitative analysis of Open Access (OA) Instruments and Initiatives, justify and develop the methodology for calculating the index of countries' involvement in the Open Access movement. The authors identified all the significant OA-Instruments and OA-Initiatives, which were counted on the basis of the records in their OA-registers. Consolidation of records in these registers, according to literature data from the moment of their launch, made it possible to identify important patterns and features of the evolution of the OA-movement. The proposed methodology when applied to all countries of the world as of 2017 and 2019 allowed the authors to rank and classify them according to a degree of their involvement in the OA-movement. The article affirms that the proposed methodology in the context of regular comparative analysis of the benchmarking tables with setting the target integral indicators for the lagging countries is very convenient for the development of Global or Regional OA-Strategies. So the authors define the concept of the International or Regional OA-movement Scoreboard, underlying the development of these strategies.