Older journal articles need to be open, too

Both ResearchGate and Sci-Hub make it easy to obtain articles by sharing in a social network (ResearchGate) or simply by making direct downloads available of PDFs obtained via institutional proxies (Sci-Hub). This widespread usage reveals a lack of universal access. Whilst a minority of papers is fully open access (freely accessible and re-usable), 47% of the new articles viewed by unpaywall users are OA. Notably, the most common mechanism for OA is not Gold, Green, or Hybrid, but rather an under-discussed category called ‘Bronze’: articles made free-to-read on the publisher website, without an explicit Open license. But all the “legacy” articles behind paywalls remain closed off.

Jan Velterop, a science publisher and an active advocate of BOAI-compliant open access, suggests that all paywalled journal articles should be given an open access licence after a period of no more than 12 months of the date of publication.