7.4.5Open Access in Flemish SSH: analysis based on VABB

To estimate the uptake of Open Access (henceforth OA) in the Flemish Social Sciences and Humanities since 2010, we start from the VABB, a comprehensive database of publications authored by SSH researchers at Flemish universities. We take all publications submitted to VABB into account, regardless of their peer review status or inclusion in the funding model. Data on OA is based on three sources. The largest number of publications could be found on Unpaywall, which records information on the OA status of scientific publications worldwide. Only publications with a Digital Object Identifier or DOI can be retrieved from Unpaywall. Second, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) records information on OA journals. The journals in the DOAJ could be identified through matching of ISSN identifiers. Third, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) holds information on OA books and was matched with the VABB database by ISBN.

Table 1 shows an overview of Open Access publication counts in the VABB. We chose to limit the analysis to the publication years 2010-2021 because information about Open Access from before 2010 is limited. This twelve-year time window includes 171.300 publications submitted to VABB.  In total, 25% of VABB publications are listed as Open Access in Unpaywall, the DOAJ or the DOAB. Breaking these figures down by publication types, however, we can see that fewer book publications are recorded as OA. This is partly due to the fact that few book publications have DOIs and can therefore not be retrieved from Unpaywall. The book publications that can be found in Unpaywall are mostly recorded as closed access, indicating that Open Access is less generally established for book publications. Conversely, 56% of journal articles have functioning DOIs, and 37% are recorded as Open Access in Unpaywall or the DOAJ.

The share of Open Access in Flemish SSH is linearly increasing over time (Figure 1).

There are several types of OA. Unpaywall records four different types of OA: green, bronze, hybrid and gold.

• Green OA are publications that are published closed access, but are made openly available in a repository other than the publisher’s website. Often, the article in the repository is a preprint or postprint and not the final published article.
• Bronze OA means that the publication can be accessed for free on the website of the publisher, but there is no guarantee that the publication will remain openly available. Publishers may make publications available after a certain amount of time (an embargo period), or when a subject becomes a hot topic. Bronze OA is the least ‘stable’ category of OA, as publications may change OA status multiple times (Sanford, 2022).
• Hybrid OA means that a publication is free to read at the publisher’s website under an open license. Usually the author has paid Article Processing Charges (APC), but the journal contains both OA articles and closed access articles.
• Gold OA means that the entire journal is OA. This may involve paying APCs, but not necessarily – the latter model is sometimes referred to as ‘Diamond OA’.

As can be seen in Table 2, the most common type of OA in VABB is green OA. Since the Belgian Open Access law specifically allows Green OA after an embargo period of at most 1 year and most Flemish universities have policies favoring Green OA, this share is not a surprise. It has been noted that the share of Green OA may be underestimated as publications that are available through Green OA as well as through a different OA route are not listed as Green, but as the other type of OA (Robinson-Garcia et al., 2020).  Table 3 shows the top repositories used for green OA. For 717 out of 19.222 green OA publications, the repository is not known. The list is dominated by institutional repositories, but also includes other online archives.

Gold OA is the second most common form of OA. While gold OA is a very popular type of OA, concerns have risen in the past couple of years about the height of APCs. APCs may create an incentive for journal publishers to increase the volume and speed of publishing, to the detriment of quality. The rise of APCs may also have negative effects on the global equality of science: Klebel and Ross-Hellauer (2023) have studied the effect of institutional resources on the height of APCs of journals researchers publish in and found the largest links between institutional resources and APCs in countries with low GDP. Even though OA makes publications freely available worldwide, which is beneficial to the accessibility of research, the rise of APCs may pose barriers to publication for researchers who struggle to find the necessary funds to have their articles published in high-quality journals. The DOAJ records information about the APCs required by journals. In our 2010–2021 VABB dataset, 13.450 publications appear in a DOAJ journal. About a third of these articles were published in journals that, according to the DOAJ, use a Diamond OA model and do not require APCs. The other two thirds were published in journals that do charge APCs.

In Table 4, we show the top 10 publishers in terms of numbers of Gold OA publications. The top ten includes four out of the five ‘oligopoly’ publishers (Larivière et al., 2015) like Springer and Elsevier. Four other publishers in the top ten are more recent contenders that focus mainly on large OA journals (MDPI, Frontiers, PLoS, and Hindawi).

The evolution of OA by year (Figure 2) shows that green OA has always been the most common type of OA, although the share of Gold OA is increasing faster.

OA practices vary strongly by discipline. In Table 5, we show an overview of the uptake of OA publishing by discipline. The disciplines Psychology and Social Health Sciences have the largest proportion of OA articles. The lowest share of OA can be found for the discipline Law. Overall, the share of OA ranges from less than 6% to over 50%. In other words, the variability within the SSH in terms of OA publishing is great. In general, articles from the Humanities and Law are less likely to be OA, and publications from the Social Sciences are more likely to be OA.