Assessing the Extent of Open Access Publishing at the Global Level

This article aims at providing a comparison of the proportion of OA publishing as represented in two major bibliometric databases, Web of Science (WoS) and Dimensions, and assesses how the choice of database affects the measurement of OA across different countries. They take into account the various categories of OA publishing, i.e. gold, green, bronze, as well as hybrid. They conclude that Dimensions indexes journals published by platforms developed in the South—AJOL (Africa), AmeliCA (Latin America), and SciELO (Brazil)— and thus has the potential to be a more suitable platform for an inclusive measurement of OA uptake, especially of publications by authors from outside North America, Europe, and Central Asia.