News & Views Supplement: Defining Open Access
Dan Pollock and Ann Michael • June 1, 2020
Analyzing any data about open access uptake – and by implication what’s not OA – can fall foul of different definitions and interpretations. In common with major indexes, we use data from Unpaywall to help us understand the access models in use across the literature. Here we unpick the definitions and color-coding in use (such as Gold and Bronze) so we can clarify the parameters of our market analysis. This discussion was originally posted as a companion to our preliminary 2020 OA uptake analysis, but supports terms used throughout our Open Access Data and Analytics Tool (OADAT).
What's in a name
The formal definition of Open Access was coined by the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2002, which defines it as [scholarly] research literature's free availability on the public internet “without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.” This is roughly equivalent to the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.
The combination of free of charge to read AND of permissive usage rights form the essence of the formal definition of Open Access. However, the contemporary use1 of “open access” can also cover just the “free of charge to read” subset of the formal definition, excluding permissive usage rights beyond fair use or similar.
More than mere pedantry
As we have discussed previously, we use data from Unpaywall2 to analyze per-article information about Open Access. The other major indexes (such as Web of Science, Scopus, and Dimensions) also use this data too.
In their paper3 examining OA uptake from an early data set, the Unpaywall team explore various definitions of open access. They state their use of open access to mean “free to read online, either on the publisher website or in an OA repository.” Given their aim to direct researchers to legitimately “open to read” articles, this definition is understandable. However, as it underpins their algorithms, and we need to take a different approach to fully analyze the market, we need to unpick it. Table 1 shows how Unpaywall classifies OA.
Table 1: OA status - Unpaywall detection model
The table below summarizes how Unpaywall sets its article OA status indicator.
The table separates the article types (rows) from the journal types (columns). The algorithm checks articles in a series of steps to determine their OA status. Note the use of colors to identify status and – as explained below – how licenses may not always be analyzed.
- Unpaywall’s definition of “open access” covers anything that is “open to read”, as highlighted in the heavy outline.
- Green: “Toll-access on the publisher page, but there is a free copy in an OA repository.” This would therefore exclude papers which are embargoed and not deposited in repositories (“Delayed OA”). This is an important subset, as papers would be affected under the zero-embargo rules such as those put forward by Plan S. The license is not checked, so “green” papers may not have permissive reuse terms.
- Gold: “Published in an open-access journal that is indexed by the DOAJ [or in its own its own list of journals and fully OA publishers].” If the article is in such a journal, the license is not checked. For our purposes we assume a permissive license.
- Hybrid: “Free under an open license in a toll-access journal”. Technically, this is any journal which is NOT identified as being in the fully OA list used for the Gold status. This will include hybrid journals, which offer authors a choice of open access options. However, it also includes fully closed journals, which do not offer authors a choice, but in which the publisher may occasionally and unilaterally choose to make content open access. The licenses span various CC licenses, and others; we assume they offer fully permissive reuse rights.
- Bronze: “Free to read on the publisher page, but without a clearly identifiable [open] license.” “Bronze” is a term that appears to have been coined by Unpaywall – it most closely corresponds to public access, such as that currently required by the US OSTP. As with hybrid, this will mix genuinely hybrid journals with fully closed ones which make selected content free to read.
- Closed: “All other articles, including those shared only on an ASN [Academic Sharing Networks, such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu] or in Sci-Hub.” Technically, legitimate access to an article is the first thing the Unpaywall algorithm looks for when classifying articles. If none is found, the article is considered closed. This means articles made open by ignoring copyright (“Black OA”) are ignored.
This gives a reasonable view of “open to read” articles. By focusing in on the “gold” and “hybrid” subset we can get to formally “Open Access” articles which include permissive reuse rights. However, as journals in this model are classed as either “fully OA” or “not” there is no separation of hybrid journals. So understanding hybrid take-up is not possible without further analysis.
Formally "Open Access" and Hybrid
To get to uptake of OA in hybrid journals, we need to separate out the journals that offer no OA options. We infer this from Delta Think’s own lists, which cover 70% of the articles indexed by Unpaywall since 2015. We can also look for patterns in Unpaywall data and make some intelligent guesses about the unknowns – e.g. we can infer a journal has no OA options if there is no OA output in it at all. We also have to correct errors in the fully OA journals. Unpaywall does a good job against a complex data set, but still we found cases where articles in supposedly fully OA journals that were classified as “hybrid” and vice versa.
The 12 combinations of article type and journal type mean we have to take decisions about how we categorise articles. Table 2, below, shows how our analysis adds formal Open Access classifications to the raw Unpaywall data.
Table 2: Open Access = free to read and free to reuse
The table separates the article types (rows) from the journal types (columns). It further splits “not fully OA” journals into “Not OA” journals (those with no OA options) from Hybrid journals.
- The bolded box shows “formal open access” to cover only openly readable articles with OA licenses.
- We can now add descriptive names to our Article Types (2nd column).
- The same caveats for fully OA journals apply as before. If a journal is fully OA in our lists, we assume its contents to be permissively licensed. We have not checked license information within the Unpaywall data.
- For Hybrid journals, any articles not under an OA license (as checked by Unpaywall) are deemed to be part of the journals’ subscription content.
- Finally, there is a third bucket of OA content: OA articles in journals without an advertised OA option. These form a small but notable subset of output – e.g. 1 or 2% of some big-name journals.
Note that our method is not fail proof. Where we cannot identify a journal from a publisher’s price list, we infer its type based on its articles. Where Unpaywall cannot (or has not) identified open licenses, we assume a journal is not OA. We have seen examples of journals which promote themselves as “open access” but do not explicitly specify licenses for their content. In this case a journal would be classified as Not OA.
"Public Access" = free to read
There are some anomalies in the data in the real world. For example, technically, there should be no “Bronze” articles (articles without an OA license) in fully OA journals; in practice we have found some in the data. Formal OA definitions only apply to peer-reviewed content, however the Unpaywall/Crossref data also includes non-peer -reviewed content. It requires further analysis to separate the two. When we apply our corrections, we need to form a view on where to classify the free to read articles. This is shown in Table 3.
Table 3: Public Access Status
Again, the table splits article types and journal types, but this time with a focus on articles that are “open to read” without regard to their licenses.
- Unpaywall coined the term “Bronze” to refer to articles not in fully OA journals that are free to read but without a verifiable OA license. We extend Bronze here to cover articles in any type of journal that are free to read but without a verifiable OA license.
- This is important for understanding possible impacts on subscriptions. The more that’s free to read, the more downward pricing pressure on subscriptions. Our underlying data allows the separation of Bronze be journal type, so users of the OA DAT can further analyze free to read content in journals with subscription components.
- The “in Fully OA” & “in Hybrid” numbers look at output “that might reasonably have an APC.”
Conclusion
For our analysis, we take “Open Access” to mean that articles can be read both free of charge and free of major restrictions on reuse. We use “Public Access” to refer to articles which are available free of charge, but which have restrictions on reuse.
Other sources may use “open access” to span both definitions as suits their purpose. We advise that readers seek clarity about which definitions are being used when interpreting data.
The role of licenses is crucial in a market context. APCs may vary depending on license type, and funder OA mandates may insist on permissive reuse rights. So we further distinguish “Repository only” for articles not available from publisher’s web sites, and “Paid access” for the paywalled ones. Together our four definitions span what we might term an article’s “Access Type.”
Finally, journals are core to publishing activities and economics. Initiatives such as Plan S take a position on parent journals as well. Our orthogonal “Journal Types” consider the major journal business models, so we can develop a full analysis.
1 Suber P. (Aug 2008) Gratis and libre open access. SPARC Open Access Newsletter, 124. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:4322580
2 “Unpaywall is an open source application that links every research article that has been assigned a Crossref DOI (more than 100 million in total) to the OA URLs where the paper can be read for free. It is built and maintained by Our Research (formerly Impactstory), a US-based nonprofit organization.” – The Future of OA: A large-scale analysis projecting Open Access publication and readership. Piwowar, Priem, Orr. Oct 2019. https://doi.org/10.1101/795310.
3 Piwowar, Priem, et al. (Feb 2018) The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles. PeerJ. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4375.
We are proud to share a video recording of our March News & Views companion online discussion forum! Each year, this session brings the community together for a data-driven look at article processing charge trends, market dynamics, and what the latest data signals for publishers, societies, funders, and institutions. If APCs factor into your strategy, pricing, or planning for the year ahead, this webinar offers insights grounded in longitudinal data and practical analysis. If you missed the session, or if you attended and would like to watch/listen again, or share forward with friends, please feel free!
What happens when the value of your content is extracted, summarized, and delivered via an AI tool … and the audience stops there? As highlighted in The Scholarly Kitchen , this emerging dynamic, known as “the Crocodile Effect,” places AI systems between publishers and their audiences, consuming value while limiting downstream engagement. Recent data underscores the problem and urgency to address it. Publishers across industries – not just scholarly – are seeing dramatic declines in traffic, and AI-driven upstream interfaces, though growing, contribute only a fraction of overall referrals. At the same time, emerging “zero-click” behaviors on search engines, social media, and AI driven platforms are conditioning users to expect answers without leaving the platform. This dynamic is particularly acute in scholarly publishing: highly structured, fact-rich content is uniquely susceptible to being summarized, recombined, and delivered elsewhere. This creates a growing threat to how publishers capture and sustain value from their content through audience engagement. What’s at stake for scholarly publishers The implications go well beyond traffic metrics for scholarly publishers. The traditional model depends on a chain of value: discovery → access → engagement → monetization (via subscriptions, APCs, licensing, advertising, institutional relationships, etc.). AI summaries disrupt that chain at the very first step. When key findings, data points, or interpretations are surfaced directly in AI interfaces: Attribution becomes diluted , weakening brand recognition and authority. Engagement declines , reducing usage along with opportunities for deeper reading, citation, and reuse. Monetization pathways erode , particularly where metrics like cost per download (CPD), impressions, and click through rate (CTR) are used to determine value, collection development, and ad spend. Content integrity risks increase , as summaries may omit nuance, context, or limitations critical in scholarly work. In effect, publishers are providing the foundation for the knowledge economy without benefit, while AI platforms capture increasing portions of the user relationship. What can you do in response? Delta Think partners with publishers to address these issues, focusing on the following strategic areas related to usage and engagement: 1. Reassess what constitutes “value” in your content If core insights can be summarized and consumed elsewhere, publishers must emphasize elements that are harder to replicate. The question shifts from “How do we get clicks?” to “What experiences require coming to us?” 2. Strengthen direct relationships with audiences Invest or partner in channels where there is visibility. Developing strategies that involve your society networks, institutional integrations, and researcher and author workflows allow you to maintain direct engagement with readers and authors. 3. Optimize for visibility within AI ecosystems Conduct research to evaluate how your content is represented and implement recommendations to address problem areas. This includes assessment and development of metadata strategies, structured content, licensing approaches, and partnerships that ensure accurate attribution and appropriate use. 4. Explore new monetization and licensing models Identify the right approaches and determine the right deals for your content, while maintaining overall portfolio integrity. 5. Differentiate through utility and trust Lean into this by establishing your market positioning as an essential destination for validation. Establish your voice based on voice-of-the-customer market research methodologies to ensure your messaging establishes you as the authoritative source for verification, context, and deeper understanding. 6. Monitor and measure emerging referral dynamics Identify and implement new ways of tracking influence, reach, and downstream impact beyond clicks to demonstrate and quantify your value. What’s Next: Work with Delta Think to Turn the AI Threat into an AI Benefit Delta Think has expertise in all the areas outlined above. We ensure organizations develop actionable strategies to address current market changes and dynamics. The rise of AI-mediated discovery and zero-click experiences is an active and accelerating shift that requires evidence-based decision-making today. This is where Delta Think thrives. Our expert insights provide publishers with the data needed to understand where their exposure to AI-driven disintermediation is greatest, how usage patterns are evolving across channels, and which strategic responses are most likely to drive sustainable value. This includes identifying where traffic loss is most acute, where new forms of engagement are emerging, and how content, data, and licensing strategies must adapt in response. Delta Think can guide you in the development of a successful strategy that ensures the sustainability of your publishing program. Lori Carlin and Heather Staines will be attending the upcoming STM Annual Conference (April 22-23, Washington, DC) and SSP Annual Meeting (May 27-29, Chula Vista, CA), and Heather will be at the 2026 CSE Meeting (May 3-5, Durham, NC), so please reach out to set up a check in and continue the conversation. Not traveling this spring? We are always available at info@deltathink.com .
This month we examine our latest data about Article Processing Charges (APCs). Per article pricing is a fundamental building block for all paid publishing models, so our review provides an invaluable insight into how the cost of open access continues to evolve. APC prices in general continue to increase, but at a slower rate compared with this time last year. Important nuances in the distribution of prices continue to affect the value and cost of paid publishing models. Background Each year we survey the list price Article Processing Charges of a sample of more than 40 scholarly publishers. Our dataset covers more than 20,000 titles dating back to 2016 and represents one of the most comprehensive reviews of open access pricing. To compare like for like, we consistently analyze non-discounted, CC BY APCs. We take a snapshot annually in January, so we can track yearly changes while controlling for publisher price changes throughout the calendar year. Our statistics here exclude zero or unspecified APCs, although these are present in our underlying data (and available to our subscribers). This allows us to capture trends where publishers choose to charge APCs without skewing averages. We run separate analyses around APC-free models. Headline Changes Going into 2026, we see APC prices increasing, but the percentage increases continue to fall back to track long-term trends. Fully OA APC list prices across our sample have risen by around 6.8% compared with 6.4% this time last year. Hybrid APC list prices have risen by an average of 5.3% compared with 3% this time last year. Maximum APCs for fully OA journals remain at $8,900. Maximum APCs for hybrid journals now top out at $12,850 (up $160 from last year). Average APC prices have increased more this year than last year. However, the increases remain lower than the highs of a couple of years ago. Underlying trends continue. Average APC price increases are getting larger each year. There are approximately 2.4x more hybrid journals than fully OA ones, down from 2.6x last year, and 2.9x a year before that. The proportion of journals that are hybrid is slowly falling. However, because they are the majority, hybrid journals follow (or, rather, set) a similar pattern to the market overall. On average, fully OA prices are around 67% of those of hybrids – consistent with long-term trends. Around 24% of our sample of fully OA journals charge no APCs, compared with 22% last year. (We have separately analyzed the number of articles in OA journals.) Price increases vary significantly by discipline. Fully OA Arts and Humanities journals saw larger than average increases; Multidisciplinary journals saw lower than average increases. Price Distribution Market-wide headline price changes mask important nuances. We have discussed previously that the most important nuance lies in the spread of prices within a given publisher’s portfolio. For example, if the bulk of a publisher’s journals lie towards the lower end of its APC pricing, with just a few journals priced at the higher end, the average (mean) price will be higher than most authors pay. The following figures show how the spread of APC prices plays out in the market across our sample of publishers. The figures are outlines of histograms, showing how many titles sit in various price bands over the successive years of data we have curated. The red line shows the most recent year’s prices. The lines become more green as they go further back in time. Subscribers to Delta Think’s Data & Analytics Tool can see full details of the Number of Titles and Price Band axes. Hybrid Prices The spread of price bands for hybrid journals is shown in Figure 1 below.
In Spring 2025, approximately 13,000 researchers told Delta Think that they were bracing for disruption tied to potential U.S. funding cuts and policy changes. Now with the results of our Fall 2025 Global Author/Researcher Survey, we have a second data point and an early longitudinal view of what is changing, what is persisting, and what may be becoming structural. Delta Think partnered with 40 scholarly organizations across both surveys, collecting more than 25,000 responses from researchers across disciplines, career stages, and 125 countries. This scale allows us to move beyond a snapshot of sentiment and begin identifying sustained patterns in how researchers are responding. The findings are straightforward: while the initial shock has eased, underlying pressures remain. From Initial Reaction to Sustained Constraint Compared to earlier in 2025, researchers report a modest softening in how they perceive the impact of funding uncertainty. While there are variations across the disciplines, the sentiment is more measured and overall concerns remain high. Across both surveys, the same concerns persist, and, critically, researchers are beginning to adapt their behavior in response. The joint findings point to a system that is not rebounding; it’s recalibrating under sustained pressure: Funding concerns remain deeply embedded. Researchers across both waves continue to highlight funding stability and long-term research viability as primary concerns, suggesting these are perceived as ongoing constraints rather than short-term disruptions. Research capacity is being reallocated. Researchers report shifting time and effort toward securing funding, often at the expense of publishing and peer review. This signals pressure on both research output and the systems that support it. Global engagement is stabilizing at a lower baseline. Some of the sharper reactions seen in Spring 2025, particularly internationally, have moderated. However, researchers continue to reassess publishing, collaboration, and conference participation decisions, with financial and geopolitical considerations still shaping behavior. What This Means for the Research Ecosystem Taken together, these patterns suggest the research community is not in acute crisis, but it is not returning to prior norms either. Instead, we see early evidence of a more constrained operating environment taking hold, one where funding uncertainty continues to influence attitudes as well as day-to-day decisions about publishing, participation, and collaboration. For publishers, societies, and research organizations, this distinction matters. Temporary disruption can be managed tactically. Sustained constraint requires strategic adjustment across pricing, portfolio strategy, engagement models, and advocacy. What’s Next: Evidence for Strategic Decision-Making Delta Think focuses on turning evidence into strategy. Our work is designed to help organizations ground decisions in real market data and signals, supporting informed planning in rapidly evolving environments. Our Fall 2025 survey represents the second phase of an ongoing annual research initiative. By continuing to track these dynamics over time, we aim to provide Scholarly Communications with the evidence needed to understand where there are shifts, where change is accelerating or stabilizing, what patterns are beginning to emerge, and what changes are likely to persist. The full findings from our surveys, including deeper analysis, segmentation, and exploration of the trends are available to participating organizations and through access to our full report. If you’d like to learn more, see the complete results, or participate in our next survey, please reach out at: info@deltathink.com .
Trust is what allows research to function. It enables collaboration, supports editorial decision-making, and underpins the credibility of the scholarly record. Today, that trust is increasingly being tested. Competitive pressures, new forms of manipulation, and rapidly evolving technologies are raising both the volume and complexity of integrity risks. And our community is responding with clearer standards, better training, smarter workflows, and responsible innovation, strengthening the systems that protect confidence in science and scholarly publishing. The STM Research Integrity report makes clear that the community is fully engaged. Publishers have invested heavily in dedicated teams, screening technologies, and workflow integration, and are focused on proactive prevention. However, the report does highlight a persistent challenge: expectations around research integrity are rising faster than many organizations’ ability to define, implement, and operationalize them consistently The gap between expectation and execution is where many publishers and societies are now focused. Defining What “Good” Research Integrity Practice Looks Like One of the report’s central insights is the diversity of approaches publishers have taken to building research integrity capacity. Team size, tool adoption, workflow design, and policy scope vary widely—often for good reasons related to scale, discipline, and business model. However, this diversity also makes it difficult for organizations to answer basic questions internally: What does “good” look like for us? Which capabilities are essential now, and which can follow later? How do we know whether our current approach is proportionate to the risks we face? The STM report shows that effective integrity practice is about ensuring that policies, processes, and systems are coherent and fit for purpose. Translating this into action requires clear frameworks that help organizations define integrity expectations in ways that are realistic and aligned with their publishing context. Turning Policy into Day-to-Day Practice Integrity infrastructure only works if it is deployed consistently across the publication lifecycle. Clear policies must be supported by screening checkpoints, escalation pathways, investigation protocols, and well-defined roles for editors, integrity teams, and external partners. In practice, many organizations struggle at this stage. Policies may exist on paper but are unevenly applied. Screening tools may generate signals without clear guidance on interpretation. Editors may be unsure when and how to escalate concerns. The report illustrates how publishers who have made the greatest progress have focused on integration—embedding integrity checks into submission, peer review, revision, and pre-acceptance workflows, and ensuring that staff and editors understand how these pieces fit together. Achieving this level of operational clarity requires deliberate design. Investing in Technology Without Losing Human Judgement Technology plays a central role as an enabler rather than a solution. Tools surface signals; people make decisions. Managing false positives, avoiding workflow bottlenecks, and maintaining editorial confidence remain ongoing challenges. For publishers and societies, the practical questions are how to select, combine, and govern tools so that they best support existing processes. The report underscores a foundational tenet of Delta Think’s consultancy: evidence-based decision-making is paramount in understanding what tools will deliver in practice, what processes will best interact with workflows, and where additional human expertise is required. From Expectation to Implementation Research integrity is an operational capability that publishers and societies are defining, building, and most importantly, need to continuously refine. Research Integrity ‘success’ will depend on a combination of tools, services, processes, and training consistently refined and applied. This is where Delta Think’s focused, evidence-led approach can make a tangible difference. We work with publishers and societies to interpret sector expectations, assess current vs. best-in-class capabilities, and design innovative roadmaps. Reach out today to discuss how we can partner to ensure your research integrity practices and processes are performing at peak efficiency and effectiveness.
This edition of News & Views looks at the changing patterns of license use over time. Are licenses becoming more or less permissive and what are the implications for scholarly publishers? Introduction Last month we compared the patterns of license use as reported by the members of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) with those observed in the wider scholarly journals market. Our comparison looked at the aggregated total numbers of licenses during the years 2015-2024. This showed a useful snapshot of the complete 10-year period spanned by the data. But how has the use of license types changed over that time? This month we dive into the temporal changes, focusing on the core scholarly journals market based on data in our Data and Analytics Tool (DAT). DAT allows for multiple comparisons and in-depth analysis, and, in this edition of News & Views, we highlight a couple of interesting examples of trends over time. The different types of OA licenses We start by focusing on only Open Access (OA) journal output. Many funders and institutions mandating OA also insist on certain OA license types, typically more permissive CC0 or CC BY licenses (to be consistent with the foundational Budapest Open Access Initiative ). However, more restricted licenses, such as those prohibiting commercial or derivative use, are also broadly used. For the purposes of our analysis, we define these as follows. “Permissive” refers to articles published under CC0 or CC BY licenses. These are the ones defined as required by major OA advocates, such as Plan S , Wellcome , HHMI , etc. “Restricted” refers to articles published under other licenses that allow limited reuse, such as CC BY-NC (non-commercial), CC BY-ND (no derivatives), or publisher-specific licenses. Although not conforming to the strictest OA mandates, such licenses are widely used and are consistent with many mandated OA requirements. Publishers sometimes charge lower APCs for these more restrictive licenses compared with their permissive counterparts. Data comparing the use of permissive vs. restricted licenses in open access output is shown below.
Building on last Spring’s survey of authors and researchers, we are once again analyzing responses from a large, global community to understand how shifts in the funding and policy environment are affecting research activity, priorities, and outlook. Conducted in partnership with 32 organizations, the Second edition of our Author–Researcher Survey was designed explicitly as a continuation of the work conducted in Spring 2025, allowing us to again take the pulse of authors-researchers, track emerging trends, and identify early signals related to real and perceived changes in U.S. science policy and research funding. With 12,122 completed responses from researchers in 125 countries , the Second survey again provides a robust and diverse dataset. Analysis is ongoing and the high-level structure of the respondent pool is already clear, closely mirroring, while subtly extending, what we observed in the Spring of 2025. A Global Community, with the U.S. at the Center of the Conversation The most recent respondent pool again reflects a truly global research community. Just over half of respondents are based in the United States, with others reporting from a broad range of countries worldwide. This near-even U.S./international split remains one of the defining features of the dataset and is particularly important given the survey’s focus on U.S. policy and funding dynamics. The results continue to underscore that changes originating in the U.S. research system are global in scope, closely watched and widely felt well beyond national borders. Science-Heavy Participation Anchored in Physical, Life, and Health Research Physical sciences represent the largest single area of engagement, alongside strong representation from the life sciences, health sciences, and engineering and technology. Social sciences and the arts and humanities account for a smaller share of responses, and as in prior responses, many participants report working across multiple fields. This pattern reflects both the interdisciplinary reality of modern research and the continuity needed to support meaningful year-over-year analysis. Insights Shaped Largely by Mid- and Senior-Career Researchers Mid- and senior-career respondents make up the majority of the sample, complemented by a substantial cohort of early-career researchers and representation from graduate and doctoral trainees. This reinforces that much of the insight emerging from the survey reflects the perspectives of researchers with long-term experience navigating funding cycles, institutional change, and strategic research planning. That experience is also evident in respondents’ professional roles. Faculty members and principal investigators account for the largest share of participants, alongside researchers, analysts, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students. Clinically active professionals—including physicians and other healthcare providers—are also represented. The overall role mix remains highly consistent as compared to the Spring group, strengthening confidence that shifts observed in attitudes or behavior are not driven by changes in who is responding. Why This Continuity Matters One of the most important features of this current dataset is how closely its underlying demographic structure aligns with the Spring survey results. This consistency strengthens our ability to interpret changes in sentiment, expectations, and reported actions as genuine signals rather than artifacts of sampling. The scale and international reach of the most recent responses allow us to surface new nuances, particularly around how researchers are adapting to evolving policy signals, funding uncertainty, and institutional responses. What Comes Next We are digging into the full results to explore how researchers’ outlooks have evolved, including: Whether perceptions of funding stability and risk are shifting How researchers are adjusting research scope, timelines, or collaboration strategies Persistent signals related to mobility, field-level vulnerability, and longer-term confidence in the research enterprise Decisions about research funding, policy, and scholarly communication increasingly require evidence, not assumptions. Delta Think’s research process is designed to provide the scholarly communication community with the rigor, scale, and transparency needed to build sustainable strategies in an uncertain environment. From survey design through analysis and reporting, our approach emphasizes methodological consistency, careful segmentation, and openness about what the data can support. By maintaining continuity year over year, we aim to surface credible trendlines that stakeholders across the research ecosystem can trust. The Delta Think team designed this initiative to gather data and to support our partners across the scholarly ecosystem. By combining rigorous research design with deep industry context, we help publishers, societies, and institutions make informed, strategic decisions during periods of significant change. If you’re interested in learning more about the findings or discussing how they apply to your organization, we’d welcome the conversation. Please email Lori Carlin to get started.
Overview This month we look at the changing mix of licenses in use among OASPA members and what these trends reveal for open access publishing more broadly. Introduction Each year OASPA surveys its member organizations to gather information about the volumes of output they publish in their fully OA and hybrid journals. These data provide a useful lens on how the most OA-committed publishers are approaching licensing and how that compares with the market as a whole. We’re delighted to be working with OASPA on its survey again this year. We process the raw data into consistent categories, normalize publisher names, and create visualizations of the data over time. We also produce a yearly blog post in cooperation with OASPA, outlining some of their results. Because space constraints limit what can be covered in OASPA’s own post, we explore additional angles here, placing OASPA member behavior in the context of Delta Think’s wider, market-level analysis. Subscribers to our Data and Analytics Tool can investigate the data further still. Our work with OASPA provides a complementary view into our market-wide analysis. Use of Licenses We can examine which common open access licenses are in use, as follows.
Impelsys and Delta Think Join Forces to Expand Strategy and Technology Capabilities for Publishing, Scholarly Communications, Education, and Healthcare Communities
Overview Each year, our scholarly market sizing update and analysis goes way beyond open access headlines. One consistent finding is that market share of open and subscription access is highly dependent on subject area. This month we look at how to best use our Delta Think Data and Analytics Tool (DAT) to understand and analyze these variations. With coverage of approximately 220 detailed subject areas, the data shows that headlines can sometimes mask important detail. Background Since we began our scholarly journal market analyses in 2017, one of our core objectives has been to enable deep analysis of our headline findings. Our annual market share updates represent a summing of data – more than 200 detailed subject areas, 200 or so countries, also split by society vs. non-society journal ownership. This level of detail is clearly too much for our monthly short-form analyses, so we present the market-wide headlines in our annual updates. However, by picking one subject area as an example, we can see how much nuance lies beneath the surface, and why these variations matter. Subscribers to DAT can use our interactive tools to quickly and easily see each level of detail and filter for just those relevant to their organization. Market Share Variation by Subject Area Our latest market headlines suggested that open access (OA) accounted for just under 50% of article output in 2024. However, this headline proportion varies considerably by subject area.
