title: Status of open access in the biomedical field in 2005.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  This study was designed to document the state of open access (OA) in the biomedical field in 2005.
  
  
  METHODS
  PubMed was used to collect bibliographic data on target articles published in 2005. PubMed, Google Scholar, Google, and OAIster were then used to establish the availability of free full text online for these publications. Articles were analyzed by type of OA, country, type of article, impact factor, publisher, and publishing model to provide insight into the current state of OA.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Twenty-seven percent of all the articles were accessible as OA articles. More than 70% of the OA articles were provided through journal websites. Mid-rank commercial publishers often provided OA articles in OA journals, while society publishers tended to provide OA articles in the context of a traditional subscription model. The rate of OA articles available from the websites of individual authors or in institutional repositories was quite low.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  In 2005, OA in the biomedical field was achieved under an umbrella of existing scholarly communication systems. Typically, OA articles were published as part of subscription journals published by scholarly societies. OA journals published by BioMed Central contributed to a small portion of all OA articles.
authors.affiliation: Graduate School of Library, Information and Media Studies, University of Tsukuba, 1-2 Kasuga, Tsukuba City, Ibaraki, Japan. mamiko@slis.tsukuba.ac.jp
authors.forename: Mamiko
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Matsubayashi
authors.forename: Keiko
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Kurata
authors.forename: Yukiko
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Sakai
authors.forename: Tomoko
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Morioka
authors.forename: Shinya
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kato
authors.forename: Shinji
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Mine
authors.forename: Shuichi
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Ueda
mesh_terms: D022126:Access to Information; D015706:Bibliometrics; D035843:Biomedical Research; D006801:Humans; D033181:Information Dissemination / Q000379:methods*; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D020407:Internet / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D055811:Journal Impact Factor; D010506:Periodicals as Topic / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D017150:Public Sector / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011643:Publishing / Q000706:statistics & numerical data