Publications en libre accès en biologie-médecine : historique et état des lieux en 2016

The emergence of the “Open Access” (OA) movement and OA repositories has upset (and still upsets) the economy and access to scientific publications. The aim of this article is to actualize and complement the results of previous studies that have attempted to quantify the importance of OA in the field of biology/medicine, through a focus on the PubMed bibliographic database. An analysis of OA publications in PubMed, based on the geographical localization of authors, was also conducted (countries and continents) and some parameters related to OA (evolution of the OA journals, the number of mandates and OA repositories established by countries and continents) have also been studied. The results show that the percentages of articles available in OA are still growing and reach 39.1% of articles available in the PubMed database in 2015. The geographical analysis of the 25 most productive countries and continents shows a great variability in the percentage of articles in OA (from 21.9% for Italy to 42.08% for the USA and from 22.80% for Oceania to 40.84% for North America). Furthermore, our results show that the number of mandates and OA repositories is not significantly correlated with the percentage of articles in OA at the national and continental levels, confirming that the public policies or mandates in OA have had an influence below expectations. The establishment of more coercive mandates may succeed in obtaining more significant effects in the medium or long-term. The steady increase of the number of OA journals, with the acknowledged growth of the number of citations of articles in OA, will certainly boost the attractiveness of the authors for the OA.