Worldwide efforts to support Open Access

What are the most important findings in the latest report on OA publications?

There has been a movement towards Open Access for several years now, not only in Switzerland but also in many other countries. This report traces the development of OA publication numbers starting in 2008 and shows that researchers are increasingly making their results available in this way. Globally, the share of OA publications has grown from 34% of all publications to 48%. In Switzerland, the trend was even more striking: the share has risen from 43% to 60%, placing Switzerland among the leading countries.

Are there any surprising findings?

Yes, absolutely. Some countries that are not among the major producers of publications, for example Indonesia, Chile or Finland, have clearly embraced OA and in some cases lead the rankings in this type of publication.

It's also interesting to see the difference in the proportion of OA publications depending on the research area: a great deal of publications are OA in the life sciences or clinical medicine, whereas this is rarely the case in the humanities and social sciences.

What do these results tell us about Switzerland as a centre of research and innovation?

As a small country, Switzerland does very well in an international comparison. It is currently one of the countries with the highest proportion of OA publications.

What stands out the most about the international comparison?

Although the OA publication mode is supported worldwide, not all countries follow the same strategy and some still do not have a large proportion of OA publications.

How do you go about developing the bibliometrics?

In bibliometrics, publications are evaluated quantitatively on the basis of various characteristics or criteria. In my analysis I rely on data from several of Clarivate's Web of Science indexes, in particular the expanded science citation index (SCIE) and the citation indexes for social sciences (SSCIE), arts and humanities (A&HCI) and emerging sources (ESCI). These data collections contain the bibliographic data on articles published in the most important scientific journals worldwide. The addresses of the relevant research institutions can be used to break down scientific production by country as well as to examine cooperation between institutions. The information provided by researchers also allows the impact of a publication to be determined, based on how often an article is cited in other publications and thus the attention it has received worldwide. Finally, each publication is classed as OA or non-OA, which is used to determine the proportion of OA publications. This is how we calculate the indicators that interest us the most.