Open access in Europe: a national and regional comparison

TL;DR

This paper compares open access practices across European countries and regions, highlighting disparities influenced by national policies and minimal regional variation.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of OA adoption in Europe using Web of Science data, emphasizing policy impact and regional uniformity.

Findings

OA share has increased over time across Europe.

Large disparities exist between countries based on policy timing.

Minimal regional differences within countries in OA indicators.

Abstract

Open access to scientific publications has progressively become a key issue for European policy makers, resulting in concrete measures by the different country members to promote its development. The aim of paper is, after providing a quick overview of OA policies in Europe, to carry out a comparative study of OA practices within European countries, using data from the Web of Science (WoS) database. This analysis is based on two indicators: the OA share that illustrates the evolution over time, and the normalized OA indicator (NOAI) that allows spatial comparisons, taking into account disciplinary structures of countries. Results show a general trend towards the development of OA over time as expected, but with large disparities between countries, depending on how early they begin taking measures in favor of OA. While it is possible to stress the importance of policy and its influence on open access at country level, this does not appear to be the case at the regional level. There is not much variability between regions, within the same country, in terms of open access indicators.