Why researchers should not fear the new era of open publication
Academic research has increasingly published open access (OA), giving everyone the world over the chance to read papers as soon as they are published, helping to improve the speed of discovery, broaden the reach of scientific findings, and increase the impact of research.
The benefits of OA are widely documented and reflected in research done by IOP Publishing, which shows that downloads of articles in our journals, which cover a wide range of topics in physical science and engineering, are on average 81 per cent higher for OA articles compared with non-OA articles, while citations are on average 31 per cent higher for OA articles compared with non-OA articles. The advantages of publishing OA also drive the growing appetite for it. In 2020, 33 per cent of research papers we published were OA and we saw a 121 per cent increase in the number of OA articles published across our entire journal portfolio.