Scientific publishing: PLoS One offers one study of open access growth

Earlier this month, the journal PLoS One published a study quantifying ‘rapid growth’ in open access (OA) journal publishing over the last decade and a half. A brief news article in Nature has announced it to the scientific world.

‘Since the year 2000' in open access publishing, the PLoS One article reports, ‘the average annual growth rate has been 18% for the number of journals and 30% for the number of articles,’ in contrast ‘to the reported 3.5% yearly volume increase in journal publishing in general.’ Among all peer-reviewed articles published in 2009, ‘the share of articles in OA journals ... reached 7.7%.’ OA has ‘shifted the landscape of scientific publishing considerably and opened up the market for alternative ways of distributing scientific literature.’

PLoS, the Public Library of Science, calls itself ‘a nonprofit organization ... committed to making the world’s scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.’ PLoS ONE calls itself ‘an international, peer-reviewed, open-access, online publication’ that ‘features reports of original research from all disciplines within science and medicine.’

The study stipulates early on that free access doesn’t mean costless access. It observes that the ‘costs involved in providing an online-only journal are noticeably different from those of printing and shipping physical journal volumes, with the major online-only costs ... being copy-editing, web hosting, and the maintenance of a functioning mechanism for peer review.’ It also notes that although the ‘transition from a subscription-based model to OA has largely been perceived as a one-way process,’ in fact ‘evidence of journals which have either done the reverse or even gone full-circle around speaks for a more complex dynamic.’

The study says that its ‘results speak for the sustainability of OA as a form of scientific publishing, with a large portion of pioneer journals still active and the average number of articles per journal and year almost doubled,’ that it ‘can also be concluded that the relative volume of OA published peer-reviewed research articles has grown at a much faster rate than the increases in total annual volume of all peer-reviewed research articles,’ and that within ‘the last few years some high-volume and high-impact journals have made the switch to OA, which further increases the relative share of openly published research.’

The Nature article summarizes the high points, but also suggests that ‘to a few’ the results are actually ‘a discouraging sign that open access is not about to take over the world of scholarly publishing.’ It reports the view of Peter Suber, director of the Open Access project at the nonprofit lobby group Public Knowledge, that ‘the open-access movement has not imperiled commercial publishers,’ and quotes his declaration that the ‘predictions of harm are being proven to be false.’

Steve Corneliussen

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for ‘Science and the media.’ He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.