Academic journals Source: Supplied OPEN access publishing has reached a tipping point with most papers available for free, according to a study for the European Commission. "Free availability of a majority of articles has been reached in general science and technology, in biomedical research, biology, and mathematics and statistics," says the report by Montreal-based firm Science-Metrix. It estimates the tipping point of 50pc free was reached in 2011. The study sampled scholarly publications across 22 fields, between 2004 and 2011, in Europe, the US, Canada, Japan and Brazil, and drew on the Scopus and Ulrich databases. "There is an exponential growth of gold open access papers indexed in Scopus," the report says. A "gold" open access paper is one that appears in a peer-reviewed journal, as opposed to a repository. The growth rate is 24 per cent per year ... which means that the number of gold papers doubles every 2.9 years. An earlier study put the proportion of open access articles in 2008 at just 20pc but had excluded papers that, despite the policy of the publisher, were freely available, says the Science-Metrix team says. As well, more papers have since emerged from embargo. The report for the EC says that outside Europe, the US has passed the tipping point, Canada is approaching it, while Brazil, home to the SciELO electronic library, has attained 63pc free. "The fact that the open access tipping point has likely been reached is an important finding for the whole publishing industry," the report says. This industry is likely to be undergoing revolutionary change, and at a pace much faster than anticipated, in large part because previous measures of open access availability proved to be misleading. This means that aggressive publishers are likely to gain much in the redesigned landscape, whereas those attached to the old ways are likely to suffer and to lose market share. The report says the fields with limited open access publishing are the social sciences and humanities, engineering and technology. Visual and performing arts, communication and textual studies do least well in open access.