Numbers of Articles, Books and Dissertation theses indexed in BASE and percentages of items published Open Access, under Creative Commons Licenses and under Open Licenses (2013-2017)

A look at the data provided by the Open Access search engine BASE (http://base-search.net) shows that the Open Science compliance among dissertation theses stagnates. BASE knows three categories of accessibility: Open Access, Unknown, Non-Open Access. In the following tables and graphs, figures reported as "Open Access" have been categorised by BASE as Open Access. The tables and graphics show data from BASE (as of 06.03.2018) as follows:

a) Indexed theses, books and journal articles

b) Indexed theses, books and journal articles published by Open Access

c) indexed theses, books and journal articles under Creative Commons licenses.

d) indexed theses, books and journal articles, which are published under open licenses in the sense of the Open License, i. e. reflect terms of use of the Open Source.

Although doctoral theses already had a high share of open access by 2013 (43%), by 2017 it had risen by only 5% (2017:48%). At the same time, the proportion of books published in open access rose by 14% (from 20% to 34%) and articles by 17% from 44% (2013) to 61% (2017). The same effect can be seen in the proportion of CC-licensed items: Their share rose by 4% (from 9% to 13%) for doctoral theses, by 9% for books (from 4% to 13%) and 8% for articles (from 10% to 18%) between 2013 and 2017. However, the share of openly licensed items is most pronounced: it did not increase for doctoral theses, but remained at 2% between 2013 and 2017; in the same period it increased by 5% (from 1% to 6%) for books, and by 5% (from 5% to 10%) for articles.