Abstract
This paper examines the extent to which research has been published open access in response to two global threats: COVID-19 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including climate change. We compare the accessibility of COVID-19 content versus SDG literature using the Dimensions database between 2000 and 2021, classifying each publication as gold open access, green, bronze, hybrid, or closed. We found that 79.9% of COVID-19 research papers published between January 2020 and December 2021 was open access, with 39.0% published with gold open access licenses. In contrast, just 55.7% of SDG papers were open access in the same time period, with only 36.0% published with gold open access licenses. Papers related to the climate emergency overall had the second-lowest level of open access at just 55.5%. Papers published by the largest for-profit publishers that committed to both the SDG Publishers Compact and climate actions were not predominantly published open access. The paper highlights the need for continued efforts to promote open access publishing to facilitate scientific research and technological development to address global challenges.
One-Sentence Summary In contrast to COVID-19 papers, research on UN Sustainable Development Goals including the climate emergency have not been made open access by leading global science publishers despite their corporate commitments to sustainability and climate action.
Competing Interest Statement
VL and IB declare that they have no competing interests. JC was an employee of Elsevier from 2016 to 2022 but holds no stock or other financial interests in the company.
Footnotes
There was a mistake in one of the the author's name...
↵1 Wang, L. L., Lo, K., Chandrasekhar, Y., Reas, R., Yang, J., Eide, D., … & Kohlmeier, S. (2020). Cord-19: The COVID-19 open research dataset. ArXiv. Dataset available at: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/allen-institute-for-ai/CORD-19-research-challenge
↵2 Armitage, C. S., Lorenz, M., & Mikki, S. (2020). Mapping scholarly publications related to the Sustainable Development Goals: Do independent bibliometric approaches get the same results?. Quantitative Science Studies, 1(3), 1092-1108.
↵3 Wastl, Jürgen, & Diwersy, Mario. (2019, December 19). Phase 1 and Phase 2 Summary of SDG Project by Springer Nature, VSNU/UKB, Digital Science. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3904447
↵4 Piwowar, H., Priem, J., Larivière, V., Alperin, J.P., Matthias, L., Norlander, B., Farley, A., West, J., Haustein, S. (2018) The State of OA: A large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles. PeerJ 6:e4375 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4375
