The use of Gold Open Access in four European countries: An analysis at the level of articles

Abstract

We assess the use and potential of Gold Open Access (OA) in Finland, Flanders (Belgium), Norway, and Poland by comparing data at the level of articles from full-coverage databases in each country. The inclusion of the journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is used as a reference to determine Gold Open Access. Gold OA is on the rise in all four countries and across fields, but some countries, especially Norway, and some fields have a substantially larger proportion of OA publications than others, with the overall share of Gold OA ranging from 5.7% to 17.3%. Especially in the SSH, a mixture of local and international journals can be found, many of which are not indexed in databases like Web of Science. As such, our results indicate that an overview of the state of Gold OA is preferably obtained by comparing DOAJ to a full-coverage database.