Open Access in Ukraine: characteristics and evolution from 2012 to 2021

TL;DR

This study analyzes the development and characteristics of open access to Ukrainian research publications from 2012 to 2021, highlighting trends, publisher dominance, and policy implications for national scholarly communication.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of open access evolution in Ukraine using data from major databases and Unpaywall, emphasizing the importance of national control and FAIR principles.

Findings

71.5% of articles were openly available during 2012-2021

Gold open access was the most prevalent type over the period

Large commercial publishers dominate dissemination of Ukrainian research

Abstract

This study investigates development of open access (OA) to publications produced by authors affiliated with Ukrainian universities and research organisations in the period 2012-2021. In order to get a comprehensive overview we assembled data from three popular databases: Dimensions, Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. Our final dataset consisted of 187,135 records. To determine the OA status of each article, this study utilised Unpaywall data which was obtained via API. It was determined that 71.5% of all considered articles during the observed period were openly available at the time of analysis. Our findings show that gold OA was the most prevalent type of OA through a 10 years studied period. We also took a look at how OA varies by research fields, how dominant large commercial publishers are in disseminating national research and the preferences of authors regarding where to self-archive articles versions. We concluded that Ukraine needs to be thoughtful with engagement with large publishers and make sure academics control publishing, not for profit companies, which would monopolise research output distribution, leaving national publishers behind. Beyond that we put a special emphasis on the importance of FAIRness of national scholarly communication infrastructure in monitoring OA uptake.