Around 29 per cent of scientific papers are published in open access publications, according to Scopus data analysed by the European Commission.
However, the share of papers available for free directly from the publisher, the so-called gold open access publications, grew from 9.6 per cent in 2012 to 14.4 per cent in 2016. At the same time, the number of “green” self-archiving open access papers has declined.