Abstract
Purpose :
Open Access (OA) aims to increase equitable access of research results to the general public. It makes viewing, citations and sharing of work more possible and may also contribute to better quality assurance as research is visible to more people. This study reviews OA policies and compares them between the US and Europe.
Methods :
The published OA policies of 35 journals targeted to vision science, and publishing in English language were reviewed. 18 journals from the US and 17 from Europe (UK:15, Spain:1, Scandinavia:1) were discovered through Google searches and selected for this study. The data was analyzed for OA Models, Article Processing Charges (APC) and licenses provided to authors.
Results :
Journal-reported 2-year Impact Factors in this study range from 1.1 to 64.8 with a median of 3.2 (US: 3.5, Europe: 2.9).
All journals in this study offer some form of OA publishing. 60% are Hybrid model journals that let authors choose between traditional and OA publishing. Amongst them, Hybrid Transformative are journals that are committed to transitioning to fully OA over time. Only 1 journal researched in this study is a Platinum OA journal, offering full OA without APCs.
In the US, Hybrid models are more common (77.8%), whereas the Gold OA model (full OA) is the more common model in Europe (52.9%).
APCs vary from $1,652 to $11,690. The median APC is higher for journals published in the US ($4,028) than for those published in Europe ($3,033).
In the US, no journal in this study grants only a non-commercial license, whereas in Europe almost 30% do. In the US, less journals restrict commercial use compared to Europe. Finally, in the US, more journals give authors control over the license type than in Europe (83.3% vs 29.4%, respectively).
Conclusions :
This study found several differences between the US and Europe while examining trends in OA.
While OA publishing is generally available for all journals in this study, it can still be costly for the author. OA options are broadly available, but no cost OA is still limited.
This abstract was presented at the 2024 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Seattle, WA, May 5-9, 2024.