Purpose The ultimate goal of current open access (OA) initiatives is for library services to use OA resources. This study aimed to assess the infrastructure for OA scholarly information services by tabulating the number and proportion of OA articles in a literature database.
Methods We measured the absolute numbers and proportions of OA articles at different time points across various disciplines based on the Web of Science (WoS) database.
Results The number (proportion) of available OA articles between 2000 and 2021 in the WoS database was 12 million (32.4%). The number (proportion) of indexed OA articles in 1 year was 0.15 million (14.6%) in 2000 and 1.5 million (48.0%) in 2021. The proportion of OA by subject categories in the cumulative data was the highest in the multidisciplinary category (2000–2021, 79%; 2021, 89%), high in natural sciences (2000–2021, 21%–46%; 2021, 41%–62%) and health and medicine (2000–2021, 37%–40%; 2021, 52%–60%), and low in social sciences and others (2000–2021, 23%–32%; 2021, 36%–44%), engineering (2000–2021, 17%–33%; 2021, 31%–39%) and humanities and arts (2000–2021, 11%–22%; 2021, 28%–38%).
Conclusion Our study confirmed that increasingly many OA research papers have been published in the last 20 years, and the recent data show considerable promise for better services in the future. The proportions of OA articles differed among scholarly disciplines, and designing library services necessitates several considerations with regard to the customers’ demands, available OA resources, and strategic approaches to encourage the use of scholarly OA articles.
This case study aimed at disclosing the changing trends of amount of document delivery services (DDSs) in the Medical Library Information System (MEDLIS) of the Korean Medical Library Association (KMLA). The data from 2001 to 2014 in the MEDLIS were searched and analyzed according to year. To know outside environment of DDS, The trend in use of DDS of the Research Information Sharing Service and the journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journal were presented. The DDS request in MEDLIS decreased year by year from 214,304 in 2001 to 50,352 in 2014 (23.4%). There was an increased number of requests a monthly average from 4,799 in 2009 to 8,157 in 2014 (170.0%) through Research Information Sharing Service. As of 2015, 10,702 journals were listed in the Directory of Open Access Journal. I can find that the continuous decreased request of DDS in MEDLIS which might be originated from the increased number of DDS service through RISS and the increased number of open access journals.
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