Researchers on open access practices 2024
August 01, 2024
72% of respondents had published their work open access in the past three years.
Open Access
87% agree that publishing an article open access increases the impact of their work. That’s compared to 77% who agreed in 2021.
Transformational agreements, institutions and funding
78% of researchers would submit their research open access if the article publication charge (APC) was paid by their institution or funder.
Are transformational agreements (TAs) the solution? 78% (a 3% increase compared to 2023) of researchers consider transformational agreements the right solution to making research findings more openly available.
68% of researchers cite lack of funds for publishing fees as an obstacle to open access publishing. This has decreased significantly by 13% compared to 2023.
Each year we’re seeing a significantly lower percentage of TA-affiliated researchers indicating issues with accessing articles as a result of the rate of article transition to fully open access.
Check if your open access fees could be covered via a transformational agreement here.
Impact of open practices
Percentage of authors engaging in open practices compared to 2023
Many open research behaviours, including open access, open data and open peer review, have high participation rates.
86% of researchers felt it’s important or very important to have the final Version of Record published in a peer-reviewed journal.
‘Benefits-based’ reasons are more important motivators than ‘requirements’ in driving open research behaviours. The most commonly cited reasons researchers choose to publish open access are the impact and visibility it provides, for public benefit, and for transparency and reuse of their work.
Motivators for those publishing open access:
Supporting the Transition to Open Research
As of July 2024, we have over 100 transformational agreements in place.
These agreements give researchers from 2,800+ institutions the opportunity to publish open access and benefit from their research being made publicly available to all.
That’s over 82,000 articles that will be open access thanks to transformational agreements!
Research4Life
We partner with Research4Life, making the benefits of open access publishing available to authors in low- and lower-middle income countries. The article publication charges (APCs) on publishing in our fully open access portfolio are:
Waived for 86 countries
Discounted for 41 countries
In 2023 Wiley waived the APCs for 3,250 articles. That's 38% more than in 2022.
Our survey findings show that authors in Research4Life countries engage in open practices at about the same rate as authors globally.
