Development of open access publishing in EU member states

Code and aggregated data and figure belonging to Chapter 6 'Developing and diversity of scientific publishing' of the report: 

European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, Kramer, B., Study on scientific publishing in Europe – Development, diversity, and transparency of costs, Publications Office of the European Union, 2024, https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2777/89349

For this part of the study, we used the underlying data and analysis infrastructure provided by Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI) to generate a modified view on the data in the COKI Open Access Dashboard (https://open.coki.ac/)  for the 30 countries in scope for this study*, using SQL queries in Google Big Query. Specifically, we limited our corpus to publication with a DOI and with type ‘journal-article’ in OpenAlex (which at time of sampling corresponded to Crossref’s ‘journal-article’ type), published between 2012 and 2022, and with at least one affiliation belonging to the countries included in the study. We then matched DOIs back to Unpaywall and ISSNs back to DOAJ to get open access information and assign publications to one of the following categories:

·     in full OA journal (in DOAJ, non-APC-based)

·     in full OA journal (in DOAJ, APC-based)

·     in full OA journal (not in DOAJ)

·     open in subscription journal (open license)

·     open in subscription journal (no open license)

·     open in subscription journal (no open license) & in repository (accepted/published version)

·     in repository only (accepted/published version)

·     in repository only (submitted version)

·     closed

The results give an approximation of the development over time of the use of different OA models in the various countries (Fig 11 - included in this Zenodo record). It should be noted that, like most open access analyses, this is a retrospective view of current open access availability of publications from a range of publication years, not a reflection of open access availability at the time of publication. Currently available information in Unpaywall does allow for an analysis of embargo times (esp. for repository-based OA), but this was outside the scope of this study. 
As a final methodological remark, fractionalised counting of publications was not applied (i.e. a publication with one author from Spain and one from Austria is counted as one publication both Spain and Austria).  

*Geographical scope is restricted to EU Member States with the addition of a number of countries for which information on OA policies and national / consortial agreements is readily available: Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. These countries, in particular, also have long-standing mandates and OA policies that will contribute to the understanding of how OA publishing is financed across Europe.