(Oct 2022) 2022 marks the fourth year that a project team, commissioned by CONZUL, has gathered data on the state of Open Access (OA) in Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ). The OA landscape has experienced dramatic changes since the project’s inception. In previous years, the team’s approach was to examine OA data related to publications with a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) with at least one researcher affiliated with a NZ university, assessing publications two years prior to the date of analysis, e.g., 2019 publications were assessed in 2021. This allowed time to account for both embargo periods and citation accumulation. This year, the team included both 2020 and 2021 publications in the dataset. Over the last 4 years, interest in the broader OA landscape has developed and discussions have been more nuanced. In addition to increasing publication costs, changing publication patterns and the rise of Read and Publish agreements, several major changes are currently underway which will drastically affect the context in which universities will operate. Given this, our 2022 report aims to characterize the last five years of Open Access in Aotearoa New Zealand (2017 to 2021) and discuss the factors that should be considered for the future.
Findings include:
- Nearly half of NZ research is open
- Citation advantage of OA papers remains
- APCs spending is increasing each year – over USD 4 million in 2021
- Open-access-only publishers have seen a significant increase in the sharing of all publications
- Institutional repositories remain under-utilized
- New Zealand lags behind the rest of the world
The report in full can be accessed here.
