Steady Growth of Articles in Fully OA Journals Using a CC-BY License

Data for the above chart can be downloaded here: OASPA Members CC-BY Growth_Data to 2016_CC0

A total of 905,687 articles were published with the CC BY license in open access-only journals by members of OASPA during the period shown above, with 189,529 of those being published in 2016.

OASPA members were invited to share their data to update the previous post on this topic. Figures were supplied as number of articles published per year since implementation of the license by that publisher. See the downloadable spreadsheet for full details.

Increase in OA articles published by OASPA Members

This year we have also included information collected from our members on open access articles across all journals and with different licenses (see Chart 1 above). CC BY in fully open access journals is by far the dominant article type published by OASPA members. However, there is a notable increase in CC BY articles published in hybrid journals, as well as articles published under a CC BY-NC license in fully OA journals, pointing to an increase in articles published as OA generally.

Usage of the CC BY-NC-SA license has fallen in both hybrid and fully-OA journals published by OASPA members. This is easier to see in Chart 2 below which illustrates the data collected for open access articles published in all journal types, but excludes CC BY articles in fully-OA journals.

Steady growth in CC BY articles in fully-open access journals continues

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

Approximately 85% of the articles published by OASPA members as CC BY last year in OA journals can be attributed to just 6 : Springer Nature (36%), PLOS (14%), MDPI (12%), Hindawi (10%), Frontiers (8%) and Copernicus (5%).

We are also pleased to be able to include data in the spreadsheet on the growth of the DOAB which shows that the directory now contains over 4,600 books published using a Creative Commons license, over 80% of the total books included.