The impact of Open Access

Distribution of journal publications in different fields. (from Nature). Click on the image to see a larger version.

@NatureNews: Richard Van Noordern writes in Nature News about the Finch report. It recommends actions to promote greater access to the results of publicly funded research. The figure to the left is taken from the Nature News article, and you'll find links to some of the reactions to the report below. I haven't had a chance to read the report, and I've only glanced at a few of the reactions. I hope to find time to post my own thoughts before I leave for South Africa on Sunday.¹ For now I just wanted to point out one thing that leapt out at me in the description of this figure.

Notice that parenthetical comment at the top of the figure describing where the data come from -- "as indexed by Web of Science". You'd probably get a similar result if you used Scopus as the source of your data, but I have to wonder whether the proportion of open access titles is larger or smaller among the universe of journals not indexed in Web of Science. Could this survey understate the extent to which open access journals are used. I presume that if you were to count papers posted on arXiv as published, for example, the open access wedge in physics would get a lot larger.