Most popular scholarly works in the English Wikipedia and their transition to open access

Following the release of "The future of OA" by Piwowar, Priem, Orr (2019), interest has grown on how to accelerate the share of scholarly works consultations which meet an open access record.

Based on download patterns for over 23 million DOIs in 2017, released by Elbakyan (2018), we found that the 1 million most downloaded DOIs accounted for over 30 % of the total downloads. Of these 1 million DOIs, over 50 thousands (5 %) were previously identified as cited on the English Wikipedia and not open access (Leva 2018). Of these, 2440 DOIs are now open access according to the Unpaywall API as of 2019-10-25: a list of the corresponding OA URL and host type is enclosed, showing that 34 % became OA at the publisher while 66 % were made OA by a repository. The newly OA works were hosted at over 400 domains of which over 300 repositories, but the top 10 repositories accounted for a large portion of the works, with the top 3 repositories accounting for over 40 % of the newly found green open access DOIs.

Part of the newly OA works were just false negatives in Unpaywall in 2018, but a small manual sample shows that most are truly new deposits. Works from 2017 can be expected to be over-represented in the sample given that they were probably the most popular downloads of 2017 and could have been under embargo in 2018 when the previous measure of open access status was made.