Nature: is it the general trend that nearly half of journal papers can be read for free and open access?

Recently, peer J published a study on users' access to open access (OA) journals through unpaywall (preprints, not peer reviewed) The author analyzed 100000 journal access applications from unpaywall users, and found that 47% of academic articles can be obtained free and legally Unpaywall, green means there are free resources (source: Tech crunch) Unpaywall is a browser plug-in that identifies whether there is a free version of the literature that users are looking for, and it only started running in April this year The plug-in was jointly developed by Jason priem and heather piwowar, two authors of the above research They jointly set up a non-profit organization, impact story, in Vancouver, Canada, which focuses on solving the problem of open access to scientific literature At present, unpaywall has been downloaded and installed by more than 80000 people around the world, with a daily usage of about 50000 times When users of unpaywall search for a journal paper, the plug-in can query a database called oadoi, which is also established by the impact mechanism of priem and piwowar, including 67 million journal paper records with digital object identifier (DOI) The plug-in can signal to the user whether the free reading version is available The author analyzes the server logs of 100000 articles that users of unpaywall try to get in June, and finds that 47% of the research results can be legally and freely read somewhere on the Internet In the process of analysis, the author divides journals into five categories: Gold: Published in OA Journals (by directory of open access Journals, DOAJ definition); green: there is a charge on the publishing page, but there is a free copy in the OA repository; hybrid: there is a free paper on the charging journal; bronze: you can read it on the publishing page, but there is no other license (such as download and forward); close: if you want to free this part of the article, you have to find SCI hub The author also analyzes how the article can be read for free More than 20% of academic articles searched by unpaywall can be obtained directly from journals, and have clear permission that they can not only be read for free, but also be downloaded or forwarded for free (gold and hybrid level) 9% of the research is still in the paid area, but the authors then upload their articles (or other versions of them, such as peer-reviewed manuscripts, green level) to online databases Proportion at all levels (source: nature) in order to measure the popularity of free reading papers in the whole academic literature, the author randomly selected 100000 articles from 67 million journal articles available in the oadoi library In this sample, 28% of the articles are free, especially those published after 2015, and 45% are free, which shows that more and more papers are on the road of OA The results also show that OA papers have more citations The author analyzed 100000 papers in the web of science database from 2009 to 2015 and found that OA had 18% more citations than paid papers Many similar studies support the assumption that open access will become the mainstream, but some scholars doubt whether the impact of OA journals has been exaggerated Waltman, editor in chief of Journal of informetrics, said it was difficult to determine whether these open articles were actually cited more frequently If the users could not see the paid articles, there would be no comparison between the two Despite the controversy, it is true that the number and proportion of OA articles are growing steadily This is good news for the school library Many colleges and universities have been overwhelmed by the high subscription fees of Elsevier and other publishers, and the relevant budget of the library is difficult to properly solve This means that the number of scientific research works provided by the library for scientists and scholars will decline day by day However, the shift of open access from subscription payment to publication payment is expected to alleviate or even solve this problem Extended reading: the origin of open access is relative to the traditional subscription access With the development of the Internet, open access comes into being Without the Internet, it may be difficult to have open access According to Wikipedia, when the Internet started in the early 1990s, open access began to sprout At that time, open access journals only circulated in e-mail and some academic small groups, and there was no exact standard, and there was no way to verify whether there was strict peer review Until 1998, in the pharmaceutical industry, the first full open access journal of Medicine Internet research was founded and published in 1999 Another pioneer of Open Access Journals comes from an interdisciplinary discipline, paleontology (the most "high cold" six generation of single biography discipline in Peking University, which is popular on the Internet) In 1998, some paleontologists co founded the publication palaeontologia electronica, which was launched with more than 3000 readers and over 100000 views More epoch-making is the establishment of BioMed Central in 1999, which is a complete open access publishing house All papers will be presented on its website for free as soon as they are published In the first ten years of the new century, the number of open access journals has increased by five times from 2000 to 2009 About the emerging OA journal peer J peerj was officially founded in June 2012 by Dr Peter Binfield (one of the founders of PLoS One) and Dr Jason Hoyt (chief scientist of mendeley) Although it is an open access journal, peerj adopts a completely different business operation mode: a publication fee of $99 per article, or a lifetime paid publication, that is, a one-time payment of $299 can publish papers in peerj indefinitely for life About the unpaywall plug-in unpaywall is a browser plug-in that identifies the literature the user is looking for and then determines whether it is available in a free version somewhere on the Internet This plug-in can be installed in chrome or Firefox browser, and then the user makes a brief description of the paper on the page, or displays a part of the article At this time, a small lock icon will appear to show whether there are corresponding free resources on the Internet.