(7 Sep 2026) Gold open access (OA) articles reached their highest-ever share of global research output in 2025, accounting for 44% of all journal articles, reviews and conference papers published worldwide.
Nearly two million research articles were published through gold OA during the year, making it the principal driver of immediate, freely available access to research, according to the latest release of the STM Open Access Dashboard.
The Dashboard, which tracks the uptake of different routes to OA between 2015 and 2025, shows that gold OA has quadrupled over the past decade.
Publishers now offer gold OA publishing options for 84% of the world’s research articles. STM said the increase reflects sustained investment in expanding routes to OA, alongside new business models such as Transformative Agreements and other collaborations and partnerships supporting open science.
Transformative agreements alone enabled more than 338,000 publications to be made openly available in 2025, helping to make OA options available at scale across disciplines and regions.
The figures also point to a narrowing of the historical gap between disciplines. Gold OA is now available for around 84% of publications in both science, technology and medicine (STM) and the social sciences and humanities (SSH).
In 2025, 45% of social sciences and humanities articles were published through gold OA, slightly exceeding the 44% recorded for STM disciplines.
However, publication trends suggest that OA is moving from a period of rapid expansion into a more mature phase of growth. While gold OA continues to grow substantially faster than subscription-only publishing, rapid increases in research output from countries including China and India mean that gains in OA uptake are being offset by continued growth in subscription-only publishing.
The changing geography of global research output is therefore beginning to reshape the overall publishing market.
The STM Open Access Dashboard can be accessed at https://stm-assoc.org/oa-dashboard/. The latest update was August 2026.
Analysis is based on analysis of data from Scopus, Elsevier, ESAC initiative and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and updated annually. The data supplied by Scopus are from a combination of both proprietary data and data from openly available sources, including the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and Unpaywall.
Source: Research Information
