Measuring Open Access: Studies of Web-enabled Innovation in Scientific Journal Publishing

Scientific journal publishing as a practice was established almost 350 years ago, having since become the main mechanism for publishing advances in academic research. As time has passed the practices of peer-review and journal publishing have become increasingly established and professional. The financial circumstances for operating a scientific journal were long dictated by the necessity of distributing paper issues to subscribers. Like in other media industries the shift from physical to digital opened up radically new possibilities for business and content delivery. Open Access (OA), i.e. free online access to articles published in scientific journals, has been a disruptive innovation enabled by the web. OA has emerged through a mix of ideology, behavior, technology, policy, and business. Journal articles can be made free for readers to access through two main mechanisms 1) by being published in a journal which makes the content free for anyone to access (gold OA), or 2) by authors themselves making the manuscripts available to an unrestricted audience by uploading them to a location openly on the web (green OA). The purpose of this thesis is to explore, measure, and analyze the uptake of OA in scientific journal publishing. The historical development, the current situation, and the future potential are analyzed through quantitative publication data covering both journal-mediated (gold OA) and indirect author-side mechanisms (green OA). Since this is an area where hardly any systematic research has previously been done the development of OA measurement methods that are both accurate enough and cost-effective in terms of resources needed to implement them has been an integral part of the research. The thesis consists of five articles each contributing a complementary perspective on OA uptake. Through the research process the initial broad snapshot measurement has been complemented with longitudinal and in-depth studies focusing more intensively on specific sub-areas of OA. For gold OA the results demonstrate that the number of articles published in OA journals has been steadily increasing annually since the early 1990s, with recent OA growth being strongly supported by journals utilizing the author-pays business model. For green OA the results prominently highlight the unused potential there is for authors to provide article manuscripts openly on the web through self-archiving. OA has lately been brought up to the front and center of both public policy discourse and journal publishing as a modern business area. The results of the thesis demonstrate that journal publishing is in a state of transformation to better meet the needs of scientific communication today and tomorrow.