OASPA members demonstrate another year of steady growth in CC BY article numbers for fully-OA journals

Data for the above chart can be downloaded here: OASPA Members CC-BY Growth_Data to 2017_CC0

A total of 1,128,721 articles were published with the CC BY license in open access-only (fully-OA) journals by members of OASPA during the period 2000-2017, with 219,627 of those being published in 2017 alone.

OASPA members were invited to share their data to update the previous post on this topic which was published on the OASPA blog in May 2017 and examined data collected up to 2016. Figures were supplied as number of articles published per year since implementation of the license by that publisher. See the downloadable spreadsheet (link above) for full details.

General increase in OA articles published by OASPA Members

This year we have again included information collected from our members on the number of open access articles across all journals (including hybrid) and the license under which those articles were published (see Chart 1). CC BY articles in fully-OA journals remain the dominant article type published by OASPA members, however we are still seeing an increase in OA articles in hybrid journals, as well as in fully-OA journals using licenses other than CC BY.

Chart 2 below illustrates the data collected for open access articles published in all journal types, but excludes CC BY articles in fully-OA journals. Note here that articles published with a CC BY-NC license in hybrid journals are on the rise and, to a lesser extent, articles published as CC BY-NC-ND in both hybrid and fully-OA journals, activity which can be attributed to mixed-model that are members of OASPA.

Continued rise in CC BY article numbers for fully-OA journals

Once again the data we have collected shows that, for OASPA members, the year-on-year growth remains steady for CC BY articles in fully-OA peer-reviewed journals. From 2011 to 2012 the total growth was higher, jumping by around 50%. Comparing 2013 to 2012, growth had slowed to about 33%, but in the five years since then it has stabilised at an increase of between 14-15% per year.

As in 2016, five account for almost 80% of the CC BY articles published in fully OA journals by OASPA members. While the are the same, the order has changed slightly from the previous year. For 2017 Springer Nature published 34% of the total OA articles, MDPI 16%, PLOS 11%, Frontiers 9% and Hindawi 8% (in 2016 the order was: Springer Nature 36%, PLOS 14%, MDPI 12%, Hindawi 10%, Frontiers 8%).

We are also pleased to be able to include data in the spreadsheet on the growth of the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) which now includes over 10,000 titles. The directory contains 6,800 books which have been published with a Creative Commons license. As a percentage this is lower than previously since a significant number of books added to DOAB from OpenEdition use other license types, however this is still equivalent to two thirds of the total books included in the directory.