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Journal Impact Factor

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BMC has an evolving portfolio of some 300 peer-reviewed journals, sharing discoveries from research communities in science, technology, engineering and medicine.

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With over 20 years of expertise in pioneering open access, you can trust our extensive experience to deliver high quality, impactful research and provide a supportive publishing experience for authors. If you believe, like we do, that openness, transparency and community focus should be at the heart of research publishing, then we would like to welcome you to the BMC family of journals.

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Library Research Guides: APA Referencing Guide: Home

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Cephalalgia Reports

A peer-reviewed, open access publication providing an international forum for original research papers, review articles, clinical perspectives, case reports, technical reports and short communications. This journal is published on behalf of the International Headache Society.

Ear, Nose & Throat Journal

An open access journal thatprovides practical, peer-reviewed original clinical articles, highlighting scientific research relevant to clinical care, and case reports that describe unusual entities or innovative approaches to treatment and case management. ENT Journal utilizes multiple channels to deliver authoritative and timely content that informs, engages, and shapes the industry now and into the future.

Epilepsy Currents

A peer-reviewed open access journal which focuses on the basic science and clinical research dedicated to the treatment of epilepsy. It publishes surveys and comments on all important research and developments in a format that is easy to read and reference. Epilepsy Currents is highly ranked and is published in affiliation with the American Epilepsy Society .

Multiple Sclerosis Journal - Experimental, Translational and Clinical

This journalfacilitates the rapid publication of high quality papers in: emerging observations, early validation of clinical outcome metrics, pilot trials, geographic foci, and highly specialised areas of experimental, translational and clinical research.

P alliative Care and Social Practice

An international open access palliative care journal that publishes articles from symptom science, clinical practice and health services research, as well as cutting-edge research from the realm of social practice - from public health theory and practice, social medicine and social work, to social sciences related to dying and its care, as well as policy, criticism and cultural studies.

An international, open access, peer-reviewed journal, which considers manuscripts on all aspects of human blood plasma and its components, from basic and preclinical research to clinical, diagnostic and therapeutic applications. All aspects related to plasma donation are also covered by the journal.

This is is an international peer-reviewed journal promoting critical studies of contemporary educational practice and challenging the complicit practices and assumptions of mainstream educational research.

An international, peer-reviewed, open access journal that focuses on the rehabilitation process, considering the conceptual and classification issues, interventions, and measurement development related to rehabilitation outcomes research.

Scandinavian Journal of Surgery

The official journal of the Finnish Surgical Society and the Scandinavian Surgical Society. It publishes original and review articles from all surgical fields and specialties to reflect the interests of the journal's diverse and international readership that consists of surgeons from all specialties and continents.

Therapeutic Advances in Musculoskeletal Disease

Apeer-reviewed, open access journal which focuses on pioneering efforts and innovative studies across all areas of rheumatology, osteoporosis and related disciplines.

Therapeutic Advances in Neurological Disorders

An open access journal focused on high quality articles, reviews, and scholarly commenting on pioneering efforts and innovative studies across all areas of neurology. The journal has a strong clinical and pharmacological focus and is aimed at clinicians and researchers in neurology, providing a forum in print and online for publishing the highest quality articles in this area.

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The following lists the pure gold open access journals published by Sage. All articles published in the journals provide worldwide, barrier-free access to the full-text of articles online, immediately on publication under a creative commons license.

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5 Public Knowledge Project, Canada

6 Scholarly Communications Lab, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada

7 Information School, University of Washington, Seattle, USA

DOI

10.7717/peerj.4375

Academic Editor

Robert McDonald

Subject Areas

Legal Issues, Science Policy, Data Science

Keywords

Open access, Open science, Scientometrics, Publishing, Libraries, Scholarly communication, Bibliometrics, Science policy

Copyright

© 2018 Piwowar et al.

Licence

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.

Cite this article

Piwowar H, Priem J, Larivière V, Alperin JP, Matthias L, Norlander B, Farley A, West J, Haustein S. 2018. The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles. PeerJ 6 :e4375 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4375

Abstract

Despite growing interest in Open Access (OA) to scholarly literature, there is an unmet need for large-scale, up-to-date, and reproducible studies assessing the prevalence and characteristics of OA. We address this need using oaDOI, an open online service that determines OA status for 67 million articles. We use three samples, each of 100,000 articles, to investigate OA in three populations: (1) all journal articles assigned a Crossref DOI, (2) recent journal articles indexed in Web of Science, and (3) articles viewed by users of Unpaywall, an open-source browser extension that lets users find OA articles using oaDOI. We estimate that at least 28% of the scholarly literature is OA (19M in total) and that this proportion is growing, driven particularly by growth in Gold and Hybrid. The most recent year analyzed (2015) also has the highest percentage of OA (45%). Because of this growth, and the fact that readers disproportionately access newer articles, we find that Unpaywall users encounter OA quite frequently: 47% of articles they view are OA. Notably, the most common mechanism for OA is not Gold, Green, or Hybrid OA, but rather an under-discussed category we dub Bronze: articles made free-to-read on the publisher website, without an explicit Open license. We also examine the citation impact of OA articles, corroborating the so-called open-access citation advantage: accounting for age and discipline, OA articles receive 18% more citations than average, an effect driven primarily by Green and Hybrid OA. We encourage further research using the free oaDOI service, as a way to inform OA policy and practice.

Introduction

The movement to provide open access (OA) to all research literature is now over fifteen years old. In the last few years, several developments suggest that after years of work, a sea change is imminent in OA. First, funding institutions are increasingly mandating OA publishing for grantees. In addition to the US National Institutes of Health, which mandated OA in 2008 ( https://publicaccess.nih.gov/index.htm), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ( http://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/General-Information/Open-Access-Policy), the European Commission ( http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/grants_manual/hi/oa_pilot/h2020-hi-oa-pilot-guide_en.pdf), the US National Science Foundation ( https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2015/nsf15052/nsf15052.pdf), and the Wellcome Trust ( https://wellcome.ac.uk/press-release/wellcome-trust-strengthens-its-open-access-policy), among others, have made OA diffusion mandatory for grantees. Second, several tools have sprung up to build value atop the growing OA corpus. These include discovery platforms like ScienceOpen and 1Science, and browser-based extensions like the Open Access Button, Canary Haz, and Unpaywall. Third, Sci-Hub (a website offering pirate access to full text articles) has built an enormous user base, provoking newly intense conversation around the ethics and efficiency of paywall publishing ( Bohannon, 2016; Greshake, 2017). Academic social networks like ResearchGate and Academia.edu now offer authors an increasingly popular but controversial solution to author self-archiving ( Björk, 2016a; Björk, 2016b). Finally, the increasing growth in the cost of toll-access subscriptions, particularly via so-called "Big Deals" from publishers, has begun to force libraries and other institutions to initiate large-scale subscription cancellations; recent examples include Caltech, the University of Maryland, University of Konstanz, Université de Montréal, and the national system of Peru ( Université de Montréal, 2017; Schiermeier & Mega, 2017; Anderson, 2017a; Université Konstanz, 2014). As the toll-access status quo becomes increasingly unaffordable, institutions are looking to OA as part of their "Plan B" to maintain access to essential literature ( Antelman, 2017).

Open access is thus provoking a new surge of investment, controversy, and relevance across a wide group of stakeholders. We may be approaching a moment of great importance in the development of OA, and indeed of the scholarly communication system. However, despite the recent flurry of development and conversation around OA, there is a need for large-scale, high-quality data on the growth and composition of the OA literature itself. In particular, there is a need for a data-driven "state of OA" overview that is (a) large-scale, (b) up-to-date, and (c) reproducible. This paper attempts to provide such an overview, using a new open web service called oaDOI that finds links to legally-available OA scholarly articles.1 Building on data provided by the oaDOI service, we answer the following questions:

What percentage of the scholarly literature is OA, and how does this percentage vary according to publisher, discipline, and publication year?

Are OA papers more highly-cited than their toll-access counterparts?

The next section provides a brief review of the background literature for this paper, followed by a description of the datasets and methods used, as well as details on the definition and accuracy of the oaDOI categorization. Results are then presented, in turn, for each research question, and are followed by a general discussion and conclusions.

Literature Review

Fifteen years of OA research have produced a significant body of literature, a complete review of which falls outside the scope of this paper (for recent, in-depth reviews, see Tennant et al. (2016) and McKiernan et al. (2016). Here we instead briefly review three major topics from the OA literature: defining OA and its subtypes, assessing the prevalence of OA, and examining the relative citation impact of OA.

Despite the large literature on OA, the term itself remains "somewhat fluid" (Antelman, 2004), making an authoritative definition challenging. The most influential definition of OA comes from the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), and defines OA as making content both free to read and free to reuse, requiring the opportunity of OA users to "crawl (articles) for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose." In practice, the BOAI definition is roughly equivalent to the popular "CC-BY" Creative Commons license ( Creative Commons, 2018). However, a number of other sources prefer a less strict definition, requiring only that OA "makes the research literature free to read online" ( Willinsky, 2003), or that it is "digital, online, [and] free of charge." ( Matsubayashi et al., 2009). Others have suggested it is more valuable to think of OA as a spectrum ( Chen & Olijhoek, 2016).

Researchers have identified a number of subtypes of OA; some of these have near-universal support, while others remain quite controversial. We will not attempt a comprehensive list of these, but instead note several that have particular relevance for the current study.

Libre OA ( Suber, 2008): extends user's rights to read and also to reuse literature for purposes like automated crawling, archiving, or other purposes. The Libre OA definition is quite similar to the BOAI definition of OA.

Gratis OA ( Suber, 2008): in contrast to Libre, Gratis extends only rights to read articles.

Gold OA: articles are published in an "OA journal," a journal in which all articles are open directly on the journal website. In practice, OA journals are most often defined by their inclusion in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) ( Archambault et al., 2014; Gargouri et al., 2012).

Green OA: Green articles are published in a toll-access journal, but self-archived in an OA archive. These "OA archives" are either disciplinary repositories like ArXiv, or "institutional repositories (IRs) operated by universities, and the archived articles may be either the published versions, or electronic preprints ( Harnad et al., 2008). Most Green OA articles do not meet the BOAI definition of OA since they do not extend reuse rights (making them Gratis OA).

Hybrid OA: articles are published in a subscription journal but are immediately free to read under an open license, in exchange for an an article processing charge (APC) paid by authors ( Walker & Soichi, 1998; Laakso & Björk, 2013).

Delayed OA: articles are published in a subscription journal, but are made free to read after an embargo period ( Willinsky, 2009; Laakso & Björk, 2013).

Academic Social Networks (ASN): Articles are shared by authors using commercial online social networks like ResearchGate and Academia.edu. While some include these in definitions of OA ( Archambault et al., 2013; Björk, 2016b), others argue that content shared on ASNs is not OA at all. Unlike Green OA repositories, ASNs do not check for copyright compliance, and therefore as much as half their content is illegally posted and hosted ( Jamali, 2017). This raises concerns over the persistence of content, since, as was the case in October 2017, publishers can and do issue large-scale takedown notices to ASN ordering the removal of infringing content ( Chawla, 2017). Others have raised questions about the sustainability and ethics of ASN services themselves ( Fortney & Gonder, 2015). Due to these concerns, and inconsistent support from the literature, we exclude ASN-hosted content from our definition of OA.2

"Black OA": Articles shared on illegal pirate sites, primarily Sci-Hub and LibGen. Although ( Björk, 2017) labels these articles as a subtype of OA, the literature has nearly no support for including Sci-Hub articles in definitions of OA. Given this, we exclude Sci-Hub and LibGen content from our definition of OA.

Based on the consensus (and in some cases, lack of consensus) around these definitions and subtypes, we will use the following definition of OA in the remainder of this paper: OA articles are free to read online, either on the publisher website or in an OA repository.

Prevalence of OA

Many studies have estimated what proportion of the literature is available OA, including Björk et al. (2010), Laakso et al. (2011), Laakso & Björk (2012), Gargouri et al. (2012), Archambault et al. (2013), Archambault et al. (2014) and Chen (2013). We are not aware of any studies since 2014. The most recent two analyses estimate that more than 50% of papers are now freely available online, when one includes both OA and ASNs. Archambault et al. (2014), the most comprehensive study to date, estimates that of papers published between 2011 and 2013, 12% of articles could be retrieved from the journal website, 6% from repositories, and 31% by other mechanisms (including ASNs). Archambault et al. (2014) also found that the availability of papers published between 1996 and 2011 increased by 4% between April 2013 and April 2014, noting that "backfilling" is a significant contributor to green OA. Their discipline-level analysis confirmed the findings of other studies, that the proportion of OA is relatively high in biomedical research and math, while notably low in engineering, chemistry, and the humanities.

This Archambault et al. (2014) study is of particular interest because it used automated web scraping to find and identify OA content; most earlier efforts have relied on laborious manual checking of the DOAJ, publisher webpages, Google, and/or Google Scholar (though see Hajjem, Harnad & Gingras (2006) for a notable early exception). By using automated methods, Archambault et al. were able to sample hundreds of thousands of articles, greatly improving statistical power and supporting more nuanced inferences. Moreover, by creating a system that indexes OA content, they address a major concern in the world of OA research; as Laakso et al. (2011) observes: "A major challenge for research...has been the lack of comprehensive indexing for both OA journals and their articles." The automated system of Archambault et al. (2014) is very accurate-it only misclassifies a paper as OA 1% of the time, and finds about 75% of all OA papers that exist online, as per Archambault et al. (2016). However, the algorithm is not able to distinguish Gold from Hybrid OA. More problematically for researchers, the database used in the study is not open online for use in follow-up research. Instead, the data has since been used to build the commercial subscription-access database 1science ( http://www.1science.com/oanumbr.html).

The open access citation advantage

Several dozen studies have compared the citation counts of OA articles and toll-access articles. Most of these have reported higher citation counts for OA, suggesting a so-called "open access citation advantage" (OACA); several annotated bibliographies have been created to track this literature ( SPARC Europe, 2015; Wagner, 2010; Tennant, 2017). The OACA is not universally supported. Many studies supporting the OACA have been criticised on methodological grounds ( Davis & Walters, 2011), and an investigation using the randomized-control trial method failed to find evidence of an OACA ( Davis, 2011). However, recent investigations using robust methods have continued to observe an OACA. For instance, McCabe & Snyder (2014) used a complex statistical model to remove confounding effects of author selection (authors may selectively publish their higher-impact work as OA), reporting a small but meaningful 8% OACA. Archambault et al. (2014) describe a 40% OACA in a massive sample of over one million articles using field-normalized citation rates. Ottaviani (2016) used a natural experiment as articles (not selected by authors) emerged from embargoes to become OA, and reports a 19% OACA excluding the author self-selection bias for older articles outside their prime citation years.

Methods

OA determination

Classifications

We classify publications into two categories, OA and Closed. As described above, we define OA as free to read online, either on the publisher website or in an OA repository; all articles not meeting this definition were defined as Closed. We further divide the OA literature into one of four exclusive subcategories, resulting in a five-category classification system for articles:

Gold: Published in an open-access journal that is indexed by the DOAJ.

Green: Toll-access on the publisher page, but there is a free copy in an OA repository.

Hybrid: Free under an open license in a toll-access journal.

Bronze: Free to read on the publisher page, but without an clearly identifiable license.

Closed: All other articles, including those shared only on an ASN or in Sci-Hub.

These categories are largely consistent with their use throughout the OA literature, although a few clarifications are useful. First, we (like many other OA studies) do not include ASN-hosted content as OA. Second, categories are exclusive, and publisher-hosted content takes precedence over self-archived content. This means that if an article is posted in both a Gold journal and an OA repository, we would classify it as Gold, not Green. Put another way, publisher-hosted content can "shadow" archived articles that would otherwise be Green. This definition of Green ("available in a repository but not available from the publisher") is often used in the OA literature (including by Steven Harnad, the coiner of the Green and Gold terms Harnad et al., 2008), but this usage is not unanimous. Some studies allow a given article to be both Gold and Green; compared to these, our classification system does undercount Green. Hybrid articles share properties with Gold articles (both are free to read and are licensed for re-use), but differ in the venue of publication (i.e., Hybrid articles are published in journals not considered open access by the DOAJ) and in that Hybrid articles are not necessarily immediately available (i.e., they may only be freely available after an embargo). We also add a novel subcategory, Bronze. Bronze shares attributes of Gold and Hybrid; like both, Bronze OA articles are publisher-hosted. Unlike Gold OA, Bronze articles are not published in journals considered open access in the DOAJ. Unlike Hybrid, Bronze articles carry no license information. Although this lack of identifiable license may not be intentional, without an identifiable license, the articles are free to read but do not allow extended reuse rights beyond reading. It is also not clear if Bronze articles are temporarily or permanently available to read for free.

Finally, we should add that, although our categories of choice reflect the OA literature, they do not necessarily reflect the more complex reality of scholarly publishing today. Organizations like SciELO and Redalyc in Latin America have been acting simultaneously as publishers and repositories and many of the articles found on their site do not fall neatly into the above categories ( Packer, 2010).

The oaDOI system

We assigned the categories above by calling the oaDOI service with a DOI for each item. The oaDOI returns a link to a legally-available OA version of the article, when one is available ( https://oadoi.org/). It contains records for all 88 million Crossref DOIs.3 The oaDOI service crawls, aggregates, normalizes, and verifies data from many sources including PMC ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/), BASE ( https://www.base-search.net/about/en/), DOAJ ( https://doaj.org/), and thousands of institutional repositories and publishers. The oaDOI system offers a fast, free API with no rate-limits, allowing it to support a variety of other services and tools. At the time of writing, oaDOI processes approximately 500,000 requests daily-roughly twice the daily uses of Sci-Hub4 ( Bohannon, 2016; Himmelstein et al., 2017). The majority of this volume comes from around 700 academic libraries, who use oaDOI to help readers find articles where the library has no subscription access, addressing the discoverability problem ( Chen, 2013). The oaDOI service also powers the Unpaywall browser extension, which helps readers to find legal OA copies of paywalled articles as they browse; Unpaywall currently has over 80,000 active users. The oaDOI codebase is open source, and the service is free and open via an open API.

Accuracy of oaDOI

To assess the accuracy of our automated OA determination, a random subsample of 500 articles were chosen from our main "Crossref-DOI" sample, described below. We manually searched the internet for each article in our subsample to determine if the paper was freely available on the publisher's website, or on another website, such as an institutional repository, an academic social networking site, or on a personal webpage. DOIs were resolved by appending the DOI to " https://doi.org/". If the full text was available through that link, articles were marked as being freely available from the publisher's site. If articles required a subscription, the title of the article was entered into Google Scholar (GS) and into Google to find alternative versions (i.e., preprints or archived copies). If the fulltext was found on any publisher page or OA repository, these were marked as being freely available from an archive. If the only available open copy was hosted on an academic social network (like Academia.edu or ResearchGate), this was noted but for the sake of the study these were not counted as any category of OA, and were instead added to the "Closed" category;

The performance of oaDOI is summarized below, compared to these manual accuracy checks. The complete dataset behind this summary is available in supplementary information. Using this data we calculated the recall and precision of the system. "Recall" asks the question, "when an article is open, how often does oaDOI correctly identify it as open?" The recall of the service is 77.0%, meaning that 77% of the truly open articles are correctly identified as open by oaDOI. "Precision" asks the question, "When oaDOI says an article is open, how often is it correct?" The precision of the system is 96.6%, meaning that 96.6% of the time that oaDOI reports an article is open, it really is open.

These results can be roughly compared to the recall of 86.4% and precision of 99.1% reported by Archambault et al. (2014) for their automated system. Their accuracy estimate was also calculated based on a sample of 500 data points, giving each estimate a margin of error of ±4.5 percentage points. The Archambault study used a narrower date window for their sample (starting in 1996, versus our Crossref-DOI sample which was not time restricted), resulting in a more homogeneous task, which may partially explain their somewhat better performance.

The oaDOI service is optimized for high precision, rather than high recall. The very high precision of oaDOI means that any estimates derived from the database can be considered a conservative estimate of the actual percentage of open access in the literature. That is, we can safely assume that when oaDOI reports a certain percentage of open access, the real percentage is at least that high-and almost certainly higher given that recall was less than perfect. Put another way, oaDOI delivers very few false positives (where it mistakenly calls an article open), but a relatively high number of false negatives (where it mistakenly calls an article closed) ( Table 1). Future improvements to the system are planned that will improve recall while keeping precision high.

oaDOI reports Open

oaDOI reports Closed

Manual count Total (ground truth)

Open

144

43

187

Closed

5

308

313

Total

149

351

500

Study samples

Three samples of DOI-assigned scholarly resources are summarized in Table 2 and described further below.

Crossref sample

The first sample, "Crossref-DOIs," is a random sample of 100,000 journal articles with Crossref DOIs, across all publication years. There are approximately 88 million Crossref DOIs in total as of May 2017. In order to exclude books, datasets, and other non-article content, we sampled only items whose "type" was listed as "journal-article" in the Crossref API metadata; there are 66 million of these. To verify the accuracy of Crossref metadata, we manually checked 150 items assigned to type "journal-article," and determined that 93% were indeed journal articles; the remaining 7% were mostly journal front-matter such as tables of content or instructions to authors.

Sample name

Sample size

Population sampled

Purpose

Population size

Crossref-DOIs

100,000

All journal articles with Crossref DOIs, all years.

Estimate percentage of the literature that is OA.

66,560,153

WoS-DOIs

100,000

All citable WoS articles with DOIs, 2009-2015.

Estimate citation impact of recent OA papers, and also OA prevalence by discipline.

8,083,613

Unpaywall-DOIs

100,000

All articles accessed by Unpaywall users over a 1-week period in 2017.

Estimate percentage of OA experienced by users of the Unpaywall extension.

213,323

The purpose of this sample is to roughly proxy the scholarly literature as a whole. As such, it has strengths and weaknesses. One weakness is that although Crossref includes information on citation counts and discipline categorization, we found these to be quite incomplete, and therefore not useful for the present study. Another is that researchers in the scientometrics and OA fields have largely relied on other indexes, particularly Scopus and Web of Science (WoS), to represent the literature as a whole; this makes our results more difficult to compare to previous work. Finally, DOIs are known to be less frequently assigned by publishers in certain disciplines (like humanities; Gorraiz et al., 2016), in certain geographic regions (particularly the developing world), and among older articles ( Boudry & Chartron, 2017); consequently, these segments will be underrepresented in our sample. This said, Scopus and WoS are also known to underrepresent important segments of the literature ( Mongeon & Paul-Hus, 2016), and so this failing is not limited to Crossref. Moreover, the Crossref sample has important advantages of its own over other indexes. While no sample of the scholarly literature will be complete in every regard, the Crossref index is more expansive than other sources: in July 2017 there were 67 million journal articles indexed in Crossref compared to 30 million in Scopus ( https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/scopus/content). Also, Crossref has the advantage of being entirely free and open to use, while Scopus and WoS are subscription-access databases; this allows the study data to also be free and open, promoting replication and reuse of our results in further research. However, we did turn to the subscription-access WoS in order to answer questions about the discipline and citation counts of OA articles, since Crossref data is lacking in these areas.

WoS sample

The second sample, "WoS-DOIs", is a random sample of 100,000 journal articles with DOIs that are indexed by Web of Science. The sample was drawn from a local version of the WoS database at the Observatoire des sciences et des technologies (OST) at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Only articles that WoS defines as "citable items" are included in the sample; this excludes non-peer reviewed content such as editorial material and news items. This sample is restricted to articles published between 2009 and 2015, due to DOI availability constraints. The sample of 100,000 articles is randomly drawn from a population of 8 million articles and reviews with a DOI in WoS published between 2009 and 2015 as of May 2017.

Because the WoS sample is restricted to certain publication years, due to availability of DOIs in the WoS database, this sample is unsuitable for estimating the proportion of the total literature that is OA. However, it is more useful than the Crossref sample in some ways: the WoS sample included accurate discipline information for each article (described below), and also citation counts. Therefore we use the WoS sample to assess OA prevalence by discipline and also the citation impact of recent OA papers. We do not encourage comparisons between the OA percentages in the WoS sample and the Crossref sample, because of large differences in the sampling frames.

Documents in the WoS-DOIs sample were classified using the National Science Foundation (NSF) journal classification system. This system assigns every journal exactly one "discipline" (a high-level categorization) and exactly one "specialty" (a finer-grained categorization). Because this is a journal-level classification, all articles from a given journal are assigned the same discipline and specialty as the journal. A downside of this approach is that the system classifies multidisciplinary journals (e.g., Nature, PNAS, PLOS ONE) as "biomedical research", despite their publishing many articles from other fields.5 In these cases, we used a ground-up, article-by-article classification approach. Each article published in a list of multidisciplinary journals was assigned to the NSF specialty which appeared most frequently in its own reference list. In other words, papers published in multidisciplinary journals were classified at the article level (instead of at the journal level) to the subject area which they cite most frequently.6

We assess the relative impact of open and closed articles, using citations as an indicator of their scholarly impact. There are several properties of articles, however, that can confound this kind of comparison. Chief among these are the article's discipline (some fields are much more cited than others) and its age (older articles have had more time to gather citations). In order to address this, we computed a normalized expected number of citations for each article, based on its age and its NSF specialty, by comparing it to the average citations for similar articles.7

Using this approach, each article receives an average relative citation (ARC). An ARC of 1.0 indicates that a document was cited according to expectations based on documents published in the same year and NSF specialty, while an ARC above or below 1.0 indicates that the citation impact was above or below world average, respectively. Using these field-normalized citation rates, citation impact can be compared across scientific disciplines as well as across years. We can also compute mean ARCs for groups of articles, like "all open articles" or "all closed articles", allowing us to compare normalized impact between these two groups. Analyzing results on the level of NSF disciplines, data is not shown for the Humanities ( n = 1,091) and Arts ( n = 164), because they are underrepresented both in the Web of Science and in terms of DOI coverage.

Unpaywall sample

The third sample, "Unpaywall-DOIs", is a random sample of 100,000 articles accessed by users of the free, open-source Unpaywall browser extension, gathered over a one-week time window. We collected IP addresses and DOI requests made to the oaDOI service through the Unpaywall browser extension during the week of June 5-June 11, 2017. In that time period there were 374,703 total accesses, 213,323 unique DOIs, and 42,894 unique IP addresses gathered in total, from which 100,000 unique DOIs were randomly sampled.

This sample was used to assess the prevalence of OA experienced by users of the Unpaywall extension (since Unpaywall uses oaDOI data to find OA). It is a convenience sample of what articles people are interested in reading, and thereby lets us roughly estimate the percent of this literature that is OA. The sample has serious limitations, however: we don't know the demographics of Unpaywall users, and we are aware of a bias towards users from the US (as determined by the IP addresses). As such, we cannot accurately generalize the results by education level, discipline, or purpose in reading the scholarly literature.

Results

RQ1. What percent of the literature is open access?

How much of the literature is OA?

We found 27.9% (95% CI [27.6-28.2]) of all DOI-assigned journal articles are OA, using the Crossref-DOI sample. Based on this, we estimate there are 18.6 million OA articles with Crossref DOIs (95% CI [18.4-18.8]). This is the total population of OA articles that can be identified and accessed by oaDOI. Given our finding (described in Methods above) that the oaDOI service finds 77% of OA compared to manual searches, we can further estimate that an additional 3.5 million articles are OA but not detectable by this version of oaDOI.

People reading the literature using the Unpaywall browser extension encounter a significantly higher proportion of OA: we found that 47.0% (95% CI [46.7-47.3]) of the Unpaywall-accessed sample is open access. The main reason for this is article age: since this sample is based on the behavior of actual readers, it is disproportionately comprised of recent articles. In fact, half the accessed articles were published in the last 2 years. Recent articles are much more likely to be OA than their older counterparts (see Results 'How does Open Access vary by year of publication?' below).

What types of Open Access are most common?

The proportion of OA by subtype is relatively similar across the samples, as shown in Fig. 1 and Table 3. Green OA represents a relatively small percentage of OA articles in all three samples. This is partly because self-archived articles are only counted as Green where there is no publisher-hosted option available; that is, Green OA is sometimes "shadowed" by Gold, Bronze, or Hybrid articles. Bronze is the most common OA subtype in all the samples, which is particularly interesting given that few studies have highlighted its role. We manually inspected a small sample of Bronze articles in order to understand this subcategory more; we found that while many Bronze articles were Delayed OA from toll-access publishers, nearly half were hosted on journals that published 100% of content as free-to-read but were not listed on the DOAJ and did not formally license content (using CC-BY or any other license). Such journals might be better described as "Dark Gold" or "Hidden Gold" than Bronze. A more complete examination of Bronze falls outside the scope of this study, and therefore further investigation will be undertaken in future work.

Access type

Crossref-DOI All journal articles with Crossref DOIs, all years. ("Articles with DOIs" in Fig. 1)

WoS-DOIs All citable WoS articles with DOIs, 2009-2015

Unpaywall-DOIs All articles accessed by Unpaywall users over a 1-week period in 2017

Estimate

95% CI

Estimate

95% CI

Estimate

95% CI

How does Open Access vary by year of publication?

Figure 2 presents the number ( Fig. 2A) and proportion ( Fig. 2B) of papers by access category and publication date. Articles published in the last 20 years are increasingly OA, and this trend shows no sign of slowing. More recent articles are more likely to be OA, with the most recent year examined also containing the most OA: 44.7% of 2015 articles are OA (95% CI [43.3-46.2%]), including 17.6% Bronze (95% CI [16.2-19.1]), 9.4% Hybrid (95% CI [8.0-10.9]), 11.3% Gold (95% CI [9.9-12.8]), and 6.3% Green (95% CI [4.9-7.8]). Well over one million OA papers were published in 2015. This growth trend has largely been driven by dramatic growth in Gold and Hybrid OA since the year 2000. However, more than 20% of papers published before the digital age are also freely available. The majority of these older OA papers are Bronze, and based on their age they are probably more precisely Delayed OA, although additional investigation will be required to confirm this. Bronze OA remains remarkably constant as a proportion of the literature for all publication years examined.

The number and proportion of Green papers must be interpreted with particular caution, due to several factors. First, unlike publisher-hosted OA (Gold, Bronze, and Hybrid), the date when the Green article became open is generally different from the date the article was first published. Authors often self-archive articles years after (or before, in the case of preprints) their original publication, leading to so-called "backfilling" of Green stocks ( Archambault et al., 2014). Consequently, the graph cannot show the growth of Green OA over time; this would require longitudinal analysis over several years, and so is outside the scope of this analysis. Instead it shows the number and proportion of Green OA by publication year of the article. Second, many articles cannot be legally self-archived until a certain number of months after publication; this embargoing likely influences the apparent plateau in Green shown in Fig. 2. Finally, as noted earlier, many self-archived articles would otherwise be Green except for being "shadowed" by a Gold, Bronze, or Hybrid of the same article elsewhere. For more detail on the growth of shadowed Green OA, see Figs. SA2 and SA3.

How does Open Access vary by publisher?

We analyzed a subset of the Crossref-DOIs sample by publisher (as listed on the Crossref metadata record) to understand how the extent and types of OA are common across publishers for recent publications (between 2009 and 2015). As we can see in Fig. 3A, the largest publishers by volume publish the most OA articles by volume, led by Elsevier. As a proportion of all articles published ( Fig. 3B), however, PLOS and Hindawi distinguish themselves as being the only publishers in the top 20 with 100% OA. More than half of the papers published by Oxford University Press, Nature Publishing Group, IOP Publishing, and the American Physical Society (APS) are freely available online. In the case of APS this is largely driven by content available through repositories such as arXiv (for more details on repositories, see Fig. SA1).

How does Open Access vary across disciplines?

We used the WoS-DOIs sample to examine OA prevalence differences by discipline, because of the easy availability of discipline metadata in the WoS index. Figure 4 displays our results. More than half of the publications are freely available in biomedical research and mathematics, while in chemistry and engineering & technology less than 20% of the papers are freely available. Figure 4 also highlights the popularity of Green OA in disciplines like physics and mathematics, where more than one fifth of papers are available only through online repositories (mainly arXiv). Hybrid articles are particularly prevalent in mathematics (9.4%), biomedical research (8.1%) and clinical medicine (6.3%), while authors in biomedical research (15.3%), health (11.7%), mathematics (11.2%) and clinical medicine (10.3%) often publish in Gold journals.

Large variations can also be observed on the more detailed level of NSF specialties ( Fig. SA5). At more than 80% of OA articles, astronomy & astrophysics (87%), fertility (86%), tropical medicine (84%), and embryology (83%) were the specialties where access to literature was the most open. At the other end of the spectrum are pharmacy (7%), inorganic & nuclear chemistry (7%), and chemical engineering (9%), where publications were hidden behind a paywall for more than 90% of papers. More detail on these and other NSF specialties can be seen in Fig. SA1.

RQ2. What is the scholarly impact of open access?

Comparing the average relative citation impact of different access categories, the OACA is corroborated: Papers hidden behind a paywall were cited 10% below world average (ARC = 0.90), while those that are freely available obtain, on average, 18% more citations than what is expected (ARC = 1.18). However, citation impact differs between the different manners in which papers are made available for free: those that are only available as Green OA (ARC = 1.33) and Hybrid OA papers (ARC = 1.31) are cited the most with an impact of more than 30% above expectations, those available as Bronze are cited 22% above world average, while papers published as Gold OA obtain an ARC of 0.83. This constitutes an average relative citation impact of 17% below world average and 9% below that of articles hidden behind a paywall. Figure 5 below describes these findings.

Average relative citations of different access types of a random sample of WoS articles and reviews with a DOI published between 2009 and 2015.

These trends vary over time, however, as shown in Fig. 6. While the ARC of closed access papers remains below world average throughout the period studied, it increased from .86 in 2009 to .93 over in 2014 and 2015. Meanwhile, when looking across all open types, the mean citation rate is consistently above the world average, fluctuating between 1.15 and 1.22. This fluctuation is guided by differences between the access types, with the impact of Hybrid OA papers increasing over the time period. While Green OA papers' mean citation rate remain relatively stable, the highest impact, for 2015, is obtained by Bronze and Hybrid. The only form of open for which mean impact has decreased steadily over time is Gold. The results for more recent years are only based on a short citation window, however, and results might change over the next years as citations accumulate.

Percentage and impact of different access types of a random sample of WoS articles and reviews with a DOI, by year of publication.

Discussion and Conclusion

Access to scholarly literature is at the heart of current debates in the research community. Research funders are increasingly mandating OA dissemination to their grantees while, at the same time, the growth in toll-access subscriptions costs have prompted more and more university libraries to cancel subscriptions. In this context, several tools have been developed to provide access-both legally and illegally-to scholarly literature. Using data from one of these tools (oaDOI), this paper addresses two broad research questions: what percent of the literature is OA and how does it vary by type of OA, and what is the mean scholarly impact of papers diffused through this form. Three large samples were used, to assess different aspects of OA patterns: (1) 100,000 articles that have a Crossref DOIs, which allows us to assess the relative proportion of OA across all existing literature; (2) 100,000 WoS-indexed journals articles that have a DOI, which allows us to assess the scholarly impact of OA and non OA papers; (3) 100,000 articles accessed by users through the Unpaywall browser extension, which lets us assess the proportion of OA papers found by users of this free tool.

We found that 28% of all journal articles are freely available online (Crossref-DOI sample). Encouragingly for proponents of OA, this proportion has been growing steadily over the last 20 years, driven particularly by growth in Gold and Hybrid. Articles from 2015, the most recent year examined, had the highest proportion OA (45%), as well as the largest absolute number of OA articles published in a single year. This disproportionate level of OA in recent years, combined with readers' preference for more recent articles, leads to a felicitous situation for readers: the proportion of OA they experience as they browse and search is better than the overall percentage of OA across the literature as a whole. Users of the Unpaywall browser extension, which gives individual readers access to the oaDOI service, encounter OA articles nearly half (47%) of the time. The effect almost certainly extends beyond Unpaywall users; one may assume readers in general also favor newer articles, and therefore benefit from the growth of Gold, Bronze, and Hybrid OA among recent papers, even without using Unpaywall. More studies of readership data from other sources would be useful to quantify this further.

Interestingly, we found that the majority of OA articles are Bronze-hosted on publisher websites, either without a license at all or without an open license. This is surprisingly high given that Bronze is relatively little-discussed in the OA literature, and suggests that this OA category deserves further attention from the OA community. In particular, Bronze OA may be significant in a policy context, since, unlike other publisher-hosted OA, Bronze articles do not extend any reuse rights beyond reading, making them Gratis OA. Much more research is needed into the characteristics of Bronze OA. How many Bronze articles are licensed openly, but do not make their license available? Is Bronze disproportionately non-peer-reviewed content? How much of Bronze OA is also Delayed OA? How much Bronze is Promotional, and how transient is the free-to-read status of this content? How many Bronze articles are published in "hidden gold" journals that are not listed in the DOAJ? Why are these journals not defining an explicit license for their content, and are there effective ways to encourage this? These and other questions are outside the scope of this study but may provide fruitful insights for future OA research and policy.

Only about 7% of the literature overall (and 17% of the OA literature) is Green. This is may at first seem disappointing, given years of advocacy focused on Green OA as well as ongoing growth in the number of Green OA mandates ( Björk et al., 2014). However, the full context of Green OA provides reasons for optimism. First, many papers are archived in repositories but are not counted as Green in this analysis because they are also available on the publisher site as Hybrid, Gold, or Bronze versions. These "shadowed Green" copies provide a useful safety net that preserves access in cases where publishers rescind it (as could potentially happen with Delayed OA and other Bronze articles). Further research is needed to determine the prevalence of shadowed Green OA in various disciplines. Second, the phenomenon of "backfilling" (authors self-archiving content published across all years, not just the current one) means that although the percentage graph of Green OA does not show the same year-over-year slope as Gold or Hybrid, the line itself may be rising across all years as authors gradually self-archive papers from years or even decades ago. This assumption is supported by results reported by Archambault et al. (2016). Finally, the relatively low proportion of green OA encouragingly leaves room for continued growth. While most journals published by major publishers (Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, etc.) allow for self-archiving, research shows that only a small proportion of papers from these publishers actually are self-archived in OA repositories; for example, Smith et al. (in press) report using a sample of Global Health Research papers that only 39% of them made use of available self-archiving rights.

Our results confirm the Open Access Citation Advantage found by other studies: open articles receive 18% more citations than otherwise expected. While at least some of this boost is likely due to the fact that more access allows more people to read and hence cite articles they otherwise would not, causation is difficult to establish and there are many possible confounders. Most discussed is the so-called "selection bias postulate", ( Craig et al., 2007) which suggests that authors choose only their most impactful work to make OA. The current study does not examine the cause or directionality of correlation, but does find that it exists in a very large sample that is relatively representative of the literature as a whole. Funder requirements may also play a role in the observed citation advantage: high-profile funders are more likely to have an OA publishing requirement; at the same time, well funded studies are independently more likely to receive more citations than poorly funded studies ( Berg, 2010). Interestingly, Gold articles are actually cited less, likely due to an increase in the number of newer and smaller OA journals. Some of these journals are from regions of the world not historically indexed by WoS, are published in languages other than English, or might be considered to be less prestigious because they have not had time to become established or accumulate citations ( Archambault et al., 2013). On the flip side, the citation disadvantage of Gold OA is likely also affected by the continued growth of so-called 'mega journals' such as PLOS ONE ( PLOS, 2018). Whatever the reason, the lower impact of Gold means the overall citation advantage is strongly driven by Green, Hybrid, and Bronze content. In sum, while several factors can affect the observed differences in citation rates, and causation remains difficult to establish, the fact remains that scholars are much more likely to read and cite papers to which they have access than those that they cannot obtain. Hopefully the existence of a free, open index of OA content will help support further research into the OACA question.

The relatively high percentage of OA found in this study, particularly among readers of the free Unpaywall extension, has important potential implications for academic libraries. Increasingly, these libraries are under pressure to meet growing prices of "Big Deal" subscription packages, and the once-unthinkable outcome of canceling these Big Deals is becoming an increasingly realistic option. In this environment, knowing that around half of the literature of interest is available without any subscription may tip the scales toward cancellation for some institutions-particularly given that this percentage seems to be growing steadily. Indeed, the Université de Montréal's cancellation of their Taylor & Francis subscription package ( Université de Montréal, 2017) is particularly interesting, given that their cancellation announcement directly pointed faculty to Unpaywall and other tools to help them access OA content. This may seem a radical suggestion, but cancellation of subscription journals has long been part of the universal OA roadmap ( Anderson, 2017b). Even when the percentage of OA is not enough to support outright cancellation, it may be enough to negotiate better subscription rates by supporting calculation of "OA-adjusted Cost Per Access" ( Antelman, 2017). However, much more study is needed to see how OA availability varies across journals and Big Deal packages, along with praxis-oriented work building OA analysis tools that help librarians make cancellation choices.

This study has several important limitations. Our dataset only includes journal articles with DOIs, which means that disciplines and geographical areas which rely more heavily on conference papers or articles without DOIs are underrepresented. Our Crossref sample includes about 7% journal "front matter" that the journal has assigned a DOI and Crossref labelled "journal article" but is actually a page describing the journal Editorial Board or similar. Our Bronze OA category includes articles published in OA journals which aren't indexed in DOAJ; future work must identify these OA journals and classify such articles as Gold. As discussed in our definition of OA, when finding open copies we ignored free-to-read articles from academic social networks like ResearchGate and Academia.edu. The oaDOI system has some coverage of articles published on personal web pages, but this is quite limited compared to web-scale indexes like Google. The oaDOI system includes thousands of institutional and subject repositories, but there are some repositories that it misses. Our accuracy checks suggest that oaDOI, and therefore this study, are probably overlooking around 23% of OA otherwise discoverable using web searches, meaning that estimates in reported in this paper undercount OA by approximately 30%. Finally, our approach did not detect when articles were deposited into repositories. Because repositories are often backfilled with content that has been published many years ago, this study does not measure any increase/decrease in prevalence of Green OA over time, but only the proportion of Green OA by article publication date at the moment of data collection.

In addition to the empirical results obtained, this paper clearly shows the potential of the oaDOI service for future research. The freely available oaDOI service provides scholars with the basis for assessing and monitoring the development of access to scholarly literature on a large scale, as well as the factors that affect it. For instance, our results show that the percentage of the literature available as OA is growing, and that articles diffused through this form are generally more cited than closed access articles. Several factors are likely to contribute to these trends; however, those remain poorly understood. Combined with other datasets-such as the WoS, Scopus, or Crossref-oaDOI allows one to assess at a large-scale the effects of various mandates on deposit rates, or to track the development of documents' accessibility to determine, for example, when authors self-archive, or the sustainability of the promotional OA category. Aggregated at the level of journals and publishing platforms, these data can also provide librarians with indicators to help inform subscription cancellations and mitigate their effects. The application of the oaDOI algorithm on a large scale also allows for more complete analysis of the OA citation advantage across fields and time. As in Gargouri et al. (2010), confounding factors could be mitigated by using article-level metadata to identify article pairs published in the same journal issue, on the same topic or published by the same authors at the same time. We hope that other scholars will dig deeper in those data to better understand OA dissemination and the factors that drive it. This is of utmost importance for the future of scholarly communication.

Supplemental Information

In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that two of the authors of the paper are the co-founders of Impactstory, the non-profit organization that developed oaDOI.

DOIs are short, unique identifiers for scholarly papers. Crossref is a nonprofit that helps a the DOI system, and is by far the largest supplier of academic DOIs in academia.

Based on a Sci-Hub dataset released in 2016 (the most recent data available).

These journals were identified by selecting journals with over a one thousand articles per year from those classified in the general "biomedical research" category. The full list of journals meeting these criteria were: PLOS ONE, Nature, Science, Scientific Reports, PNAS, Nature Communication, PeerJ, and Science Advances.

Ties between frequently cited specialties were resolved randomly; that is, if a paper cites exactly the same amount of papers from two NSF specialties, it was assigned to one of the two at random

Citations were normalized using the population of WoS articles and reviews with a DOI.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dorothea Salo, Kristin Antelman, and John Sack for extensive and valuable comments on a draft of this article. The author order of JP and HP was determined by coin flip, as is their custom.

Additional Information and Declarations

Competing Interests

Heather Piwowar and Jason Priem are founders of Impactstory, a non-profit company which makes Unpaywall, oaDOI, and other tools to improve scholarly communication.

Author Contributions

Heather Piwowar, Jason Priem and Stefanie Haustein conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Vincent Larivière conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Juan Pablo Alperin conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Lisa Matthias performed the experiments, analyzed the data, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Bree Norlander analyzed the data, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Funding

The authors received no funding for this work.

References

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Despite growing interest in Open Access (OA) to scholarly literature, there is an unmet need for large-scale, up-to-date, and reproducible studies assessing the prevalence and characteristics of OA. We address this need using oaDOI, an open online service that determines OA status for 67 million articles.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
DOAB is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users to find trusted open access book publishers. All DOAB services are free of charge and all data is freely available.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Subject Areas

Legal Issues, Science Policy, Data Science

Keywords

open access, open science, scientometrics, publishing, libraries, scholarly communication, bibliometrics, science policy

Copyright

Licence

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.

Cite this article

Piwowar H, Priem J, Larivière V, Alperin JP, Matthias L, Norlander B, Farley A, West J, Haustein S. 2017. The State of OA: A large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles. :e3119v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3119v1

Abstract

Despite growing interest in Open Access (OA) to scholarly literature, there is an unmet need for large-scale, up-to-date, and reproducible studies assessing the prevalence and characteristics of OA. We address this need using oaDOI, an open online service that determines OA status for 67 million articles.

We use three samples, each of 100,000 articles, to investigate OA in three populations: 1) all journal articles assigned a Crossref DOI, 2) recent journal articles indexed in Web of Science, and 3) articles viewed by users of Unpaywall, an open-source browser extension that lets users find OA articles using oaDOI.

We estimate that at least 28% of the scholarly literature is OA (19M in total) and that this proportion is growing, driven particularly by growth in Gold and Hybrid. The most recent year analyzed (2015) also has the highest percentage of OA (45%). Because of this growth, and the fact that readers disproportionately access newer articles, we find that Unpaywall users encounter OA quite frequently: 47% of articles they view are OA. Notably, the most common mechanism for OA is not Gold, Green, or Hybrid OA, but rather an under-discussed category we dub Bronze: articles made free-to-read on the publisher website, without an explicit Open license.

We also examine the citation impact of OA articles, corroborating the so-called open-access citation advantage: accounting for age and discipline, OA articles receive 18% more citations than average, an effect driven primarily by Green and Hybrid OA. We encourage further research using the free oaDOI service, as a way to inform OA policy and practice.

Author Comment

This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints.

Additional Information

Competing Interests

Heather Piwowar and Jason Priem are founders of Impactstory, a non-profit company which makes Unpaywall, oaDOI, and other tools to improve scholarly communication.

Author Contributions

Heather Piwowar conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Jason Priem conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Vincent Larivière conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Juan Pablo Alperin conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Lisa Matthias performed the experiments, analyzed the data, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Bree Norlander analyzed the data, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Stefanie Haustein conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Funding

The authors received no funding for this work.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The State of OA: A large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Despite growing interest in Open Access (OA) to scholarly literature, there is an unmet need for large-scale, up-to-date, and reproducible studies assessing the prevalence and characteristics of OA. We address this need using oaDOI, an open online service that determines OA status for 67 million articles.

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Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Facilitating library access to scholarly texts brings us one step closer to this goal. We're thankful to the libraries and librarians who make it possible.

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To configure publishing to Google Scholar

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To configure publishing to Google Scholar

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Identifiers - Note that only records with ISSN/ISBN identifiers (coming from the 022/020 fields) are published.

Full coverage, if it exists

When working with a Network Zone, Alma publishes electronic holdings from the Network Zone and each member institution at the same time and creates the following, respectively:

One institutional holdings file for each "Available for" group that has been defined in the Network Zone. Each "Available for" group corresponds to each of the member institutions.

One institutional holdings file from each member institution.

Each week, the system merges the above institutional holdings files into a single institutional holdings file so that it can be harvested by Google Scholar.

On the Publishing Profiles Details page (Resources > Publishing > Publishing Profiles), select Edit in the row actions list for the Publish electronic records to Google Scholar publishing profile. The Publishing Profile Details page for Google Scholar appears..

For multicampus configurations, the Publishing Profile Details page opens and displays the Electronic profiles section, which allows you to configure Google Scholar settings per campus. For more information, see Adding a Profile for a Multicampus Configuration.

Configure the fields in the profile.

Parameter

Description

Publishing Parameters:

Status

Active or Inactive.

Scheduling

The publishing schedule.

Email Notifications

Specify which users and email addresses will receive email notifications when the publishing profile has completed.

Registration Parameters:

Display Name

The display name for your institution/campus in the Google Scholar preferences. If no name is provided, the display name defaults to the institution name.

Keywords 1/2/3/4/5

The keywords (such as the school's nickname) that enable users to find the library when configuring their preferences in Google Scholar. This field is optional and has a limit of five words or 30 characters.

Label of resolver links (when article exists electronically)

The label for the link that appears in Google Scholar search results. This field is mandatory and has a limit of 25 characters.

If you have an old Google Scholar account, it is recommended that you set a new label for testing purposes, so that you can distinguish between your old and new systems. Following verification, you can change the label back to its required setting.

Note that your old label must be decommissioned after "Go Live," when you start working with Google Scholar productively.

Label of resolver links (when article does not exist electronically)

The label for the link that appears in Google Scholar search results. This field is mandatory and has a limit of 25 characters.

OpenURL base

The value is the base URL of the Alma services page. This field is mandatory and has a limit of 1024 characters.

Use the following format for Alma-Summon: https://<Alma_domain>/openurl/<Institution_code>/<View_code>?

Use the following format for Primo (new UI) and Primo VE: https://<Primo_domain>/openurl/<Institution_code>/<View_code>?

Where the base URL includes the following elements:

Example for Primo VE:
https:// mylibrary.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/openurl/01MY_INST/01MY_INST:MY_VIEW?

Example for Summon:
https://na01.alma.exlibrisgroup.com/openurl/01MY_INST/01MY_INST:Services?

Example for Primo (new UI):
https://primo2.prod.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/openurl/01MY_INST/MY_VIEW?

Patron IP range

The range of library IP addresses that allow users to see your links without selecting your institution under Google Scholar Settings > Library links (see the figure Google Scholar Library Links in Verifying Google Scholar Data). This field is optional

Enter no more than 256 IP ranges separated with semicolons. For example: 123.12.12.*;122.10.10.1-123.10.10.80

Show resolver links only to users that come from your IP range?

Whether users must perform searches from within the specified IP ranges to see your links in Google Scholar search results. This field is mandatory. The valid values are yes and no. The default value is no, which is recommended unless your links reveal sensitive information.

Contact Information for Technical Issue

Enter your institution's contact information in First name, Last name, and Email address.

Select Save to save the changes.

Make sure that you have scheduled the Google publishing job to run either Saturday or Sunday. Google's harvesting process begins on Mondays and may not finish until Thursday of that week.

The label you configured is visible on the live Google Scholar site, which is why it is recommended that you initially configure your profile using a test label. If you are concerned about the display of a test label during implementation, it is recommended that you do not test Google Scholar until after "Go Live." (In any event, your old label should not be decommissioned until after "Go Live.")

Verify that your Google Scholar data is correct (see below, Verifying Google Scholar Data).

Adding a Profile for a Multicampus Configuration

For multicampus configurations, the Publish electronic records to Google Scholar publishing profile job includes an Electronic Profiles section, which allows you to configure different Google Scholar registration parameters per groups of libraries and campuses that are defined as inventory management groups in a multicampus configuration (each of which can be defined separately as a Primo institution, or all together as one Primo institution). This allows you to publish separate holdings information per campus.

To add a Google Scholar profile:

Verifying Google Scholar Data

After publishing records to Google Scholar or updating Google registration settings, this section describes how to verify your updates to Google Scholar.

To verify that your Google Scholar data is accessible:

If you completed the configuration instructions above, the required amount of time has elapsed, and links for your institution do not appear in Google Scholar, open a support case in order to complete your Google Scholar registration.

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Publishing Electronic Holdings to Google Scholar

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To publish electronic holdings to Google Scholar, you must configure the Publish electronic records to Google Scholar publishing profile. This schedules the Publishing to Google Scholar job. Run the job weekly to make sure that holdings information is accurate. This publishing profile contains the settings used by Google Scholar to display holdings information for your institution.

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Owned by Schwartz Media - publishers of the Quarterly Essay, The Monthly.

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"An ugly wound has been opened at the heart of St Kevin's College this week, after revelations in a Four Corners report about the school's failures to respond to complaints of a culture of secrecy, toxic masculinity and sexual abuse. As the dust settles, many in the school community, including me, are coming to terms with the extent of reform that is needed. This uncertainty comes at a crucial moment, not only for the school, but also for the country as a whole, to confront a deep-seated culture of secrecy and shame."

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"An ugly wound has been opened at the heart of St Kevin's College this week, after revelations in a Four Corners report about the school's failures to respond to complaints of a culture of secrecy, toxic masculinity and sexual abuse.

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Guardian Media Group is a UK media organisations owned by The Scott Trust.

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News, sport and opinion from the Guardian's Australia edition | The Guardian

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Latest news, sport, comment, analysis and reviews from Guardian Australia

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News Ticker

Flood warning

For the latest flood and weather warnings, search on ABC Emergency

Latest Fact Check

Samantha Ratnam says Victorians have lost $66 billion on the pokies. But that figure does not account for inflation - or the losses that have occurred at Crown Casino.

Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus says the government's National Anti-Corruption Commission bill honours Labor's election promise "in both form and substance". Is that correct? RMIT ABC Fact Check investigates.

Did the Treasurer get his facts straight in Labor's first budget speech in a decade? RMIT ABC Fact Check investigates.

Updated

ACTU Secretary Sally McManus says labour's share of GDP is the lowest it's been since the 1960s.

Duration: 1 minute 4 seconds

Tech entrepreneur Mike Cannon-Brookes says Australia makes up 5 per cent of carbon emissions, when we factor in our exports of fossil fuels.

Duration: 1 minute 43 seconds

Opposition spokeswoman for Indigenous Australians, Linda Burney, says Australia's constitution is the only constitution of a first world nation with a colonial history that doesn't recognise its first people. RMIT ABC Fact Check investigates.

Duration: 1 minute 37 seconds

We acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Australians and Traditional Custodians of the lands where we live, learn, and work.

More from ABC News

This service may include material from Agence France-Presse (AFP), APTN, Reuters, AAP, CNN and the BBC World Service which is copyright and cannot be reproduced.

AEST = Australian Eastern Standard Time which is 10 hours ahead of GMT (Greenwich Mean Time)

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For the latest flood and weather warnings, search on ABC Emergency Latest Fact Check Samantha Ratnam says Victorians have lost $66 billion on the pokies. But that figure does not account for inflation - or the losses that have occurred at Crown Casino.

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Get the latest Australian and world news covering breaking news and trending topics that educate, engage and entertain.

An SBS initiative providing comprehensive information on the cultural background of Australia's migrant populations. The aim is to improve social cohesion and promote inclusion in an increasingly culturally diverse society.

Stay informed by signing up to our newsletter. Get the latest from SBS News each morning, afternoon and every weekend.

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SBS News - Trusted Australian, world and breaking news

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The bigger picture with the latest news from Australia and across the world. Get breaking news stories and videos. Download the SBS News app now. Watch SBS World News 6.30pm AEST nightly and 10.30pm AEST Mon-Fri, listen at 6am & 6pm AEST Mon-Fri.

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National Indigenous Television, News and Programs | SBS NITV

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Home of Indigenous storytelling, with TV programs and news that inspire, instill pride and lead to a greater respect of Indigenous Australians and Aboriginal culture.

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IMF - International Monetary Fund eLibrary - Global Economic knowledge

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IMF - International Monetary Fund eLibrary - Global Economic knowledge

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National Library of Medicine
National Institutes of Health

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9.5 MILLION articles are archived in PMC.

Content provided in part by:

2849

Full Participation Journals

Journals deposit the complete contents of each issue or volume.

300

NIH Portfolio Journals

Journals deposit all NIH-funded articles as defined by the NIH Public Access Policy.

43

Selective Deposit Programs

Publisher deposits a subset of articles from a collection of journals.

New in PMC

Aug. 30, 2023

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) collaborated with publishers and scholarly soci...

May 3, 2023

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) recently renamed the COVID-19 and Mpox Public Health Emergency Initiatives as t...

highlights

Second Phase of the NIH Preprint Pilot Launched

The second phase launched in January 2023 and expands the scope of the Pilot to include preprints resulting from all NIH-funded research.

Read More

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Content provided in part by: Journals deposit the complete contents of each issue or volume. Journals deposit all NIH-funded articles as defined by the NIH Public Access Policy. Publisher deposits a subset of articles from a collection of journals. New in PMC Aug.

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Harvested content directly from over 50,000 journals and open-access repositories from all over the world

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Wangkatha, Bindinini, Pindini, Pintiini, Wangkathaa, Maduwongga, Ngurlu, Waljen, Wanggaji, Wangkayi, Bindunda, Pini, Wangaga, Wanggada, Wonga, Wongai i, Wongaidya, Wongaii, Wonggai, Wonggaii, Wongi, Wonkai, Won gaii

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The following are instructional aids for the seventh edition Publication Manual. They can be used in homes, classrooms, libraries, or anywhere you are learning or teaching APA Style.

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Bond Library - using the open access filter

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Bond Library - using the open access filter

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https://library.bond.edu.au/

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Bond University Library provides customer-focused, innovative services and resources to support the teaching, learning and research needs of the University.

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Information for Bond Alumni about using the Library and freely available online resources.

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Aboriginal & Torres Strait Island Knowledge Guide

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Aboriginal & Torres Strait Island Knowledge Guide

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Library Research Guides: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Knowledge Guide: Home

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This guide will help you find information about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, history, culture, and rights. About

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Using the Internet for Assignments and Research

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Using the Internet for Assignments and Research

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Library Research Guides: Using the Internet for Assignments and Research: Home

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This guide discusses when it is appropriate to use the internet for an assignment or research, and provides some tips for making the most out of your internet searches.

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The APA Style Blog has moved to a new location.

You should be redirected to our new seventh edition blog at its new home momentarily: https://apastyle.apa.org/blog

If you're looking for the sixth edition blog archive it's still available: https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/apa-style-blog-6th-edition-archive.html

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APA Style 6th Edition Blog: This page has moved

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The APA Style Blog has moved to a new location. You should be redirected to our new seventh edition blog at its new home momentarily: https://apastyle.apa.org/blog If you're looking for the sixth edition blog archive it's still available: https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/apa-style-blog-6th-edition-archive.html

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Free images no attribution

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Beautiful Free Images & Pictures | Unsplash

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Beautiful, free images and photos that you can download and use for any project. Better than any royalty free or stock photos.

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INTRODUCTION ABS WEBSITE General web pages Publications Time series spreadsheets Data cubes Census material PRINTED SOURCES Publications Joint authorship publications Chapters Tables Maps Brochures Journals and newsletters AUDIOVISUAL SOURCES CD-ROM Videos Microfiche CLIB and CDATA TAILORED UNPUBLISHED DATA TableBuilder Microdata Tailored data Dynamically generated tables/files Email REFERENCE LIST INTRODUCTION Information from the Australian Bureau of Statistics must be acknowledged responsibly whenever it is used.

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Always acknowledge an author's idea - it also shows you have widely researched your topic.

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Always acknowledge an author's idea - it also shows you have widely researched your topic.

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- documentaries GC Libraries

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Kanopy - Stream Classic Cinema, Indie Film and Top Documentaries

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Watch over 30,000 Documentaries, Classic and Indie Films. On Desktop, Mobile and Roku for Students, Professors & Library Patrons.

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24211013292019

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Go to one of the BIGGEST & busiest public libraries in Australia - The Gold Coast Library!

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Go to one of the BIGGEST & busiest public libraries in Australia - The Gold Coast Library!

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http://www.goldcoast.qld.gov.au/library/science-11094.html
24211013292019
Enter your user ID & Pin!
EBSCO Database
Proquest Database

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Proquest - Science Journals - use your GC library login details to access...

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Proquest - Science Journals - use your GC library login details to access...

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http://www.goldcoast.qld.gov.au/library/science-11094.html

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http://www.goldcoast.qld.gov.au/library/health-11084.html

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DOAJ is an online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.

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DOAJ is an online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.

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https://doaj.org/

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About the directory

DOAJ is a unique and extensive index of diverse open access journals from around the world, driven by a growing community, and is committed to ensuring quality content is freely available online for everyone.

DOAJ is committed to keeping its services free of charge, including being indexed, and its data freely available.

→ About DOAJ

→ How to apply

DOAJ is twenty years old in 2023.

Fund our 20th anniversary campaign

Funding

DOAJ is independent. All support is via donations.

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Publishers don't need to donate to be part of DOAJ.

Librarianship, Scholarly Publishing, Data Management
Fei Yu

Brisbane, Australia (Chinese, English)

Lut Tamam

Adana, Türkiye (Turkish, English)

Humanities, Social Sciences
Natalia Pamuła-Cieślak

Toruń, Poland (Polish, English)

Research Evaluation
Paola Galimberti

Milan, Italy (Italian, German, English)

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Directory of Open Access Journals - DOAJ

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DOAJ is a unique and extensive index of diverse open access journals from around the world, driven by a growing community, committed to ensuring quality content is freely available online for everyone.

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https://scholar.google.com.au/

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Home of JAMA and the Specialty Journals of the American Medical Association

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Stay up to date, maintain your CME with the latest research, author interviews, apps, and learning courses from JAMA and the Specialty Journals.

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PubMed comprises over 28 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. PubMed citations and abstracts include the fields of biomedicine and health, covering portions of the life sciences, behavioral sciences, chemical sciences, and bioengineering. PubMed also provides access to additional relevant web sites and links to the other NCBI molecular biology resources.

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The most important academic database in the health sciences is actually free on the web for anyone to search (however getting full text of the articles will often require a subscription) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed

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'What was before Lord Vestey born and I born? It was blackfella country.' Vincent Lingiari (Wattie Creek 1966)

Australia's First Peoples have been living on the Australian continent for millenia.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australia is made up of many different and distinct groups, each with their own culture, customs, language and laws. They are the world's oldest surviving culture; cultures that continue to be expressed in dynamic and contemporary ways.

The AIATSIS map serves as a visual reminder of the richness and diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australia. It was created in 1996 as part of the Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia project and attempts to show language, social or nation groups based on published sources available up to 1994.

The map shows only the general locations of larger groups of people which may include smaller groups. There are also variations in the way that some language or group names are spelt. You can view some of these alternate spellings on the list of alternate spellings for names on the AIATSIS map of Indigenous Australia below.

Note that the borders between groups are purposefully represented as slightly blurred and are not meant to be exact. Some of the information shown on the map is contested and may not be agreed to by some traditional custodians - the map isn't suitable for native title or other land claims.

The map isn't the only source of information; if you would like more information about Australian Indigenous languages please see our Austlang database. The National Native Title Tribunal also produces maps that show native title claims determinations.

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The AIATSIS map serves as a visual reminder of the richness and diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australia.

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"From December 2017 the ABS will bring together data from the 2006, 2011 and 2016 censuses to create a research tool for how Australian society is changing over time."

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Find pages (pdf) within Government or organisational websites ie  .gov  .org  .edu

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Find pages (pdf) within Government or organisational websites ie  .gov  .org  .edu

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Owned by five Bundjalung Aboriginal community organisations. Lismore NSW.  Pdf issues accessed via AIATSIS or subscribe to https://koorimail.com/

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Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies

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Download the available Koori Mail issues as PDF files.

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A series of short historical based documentaries featuring untold First Nations stories designed to gain momentum for Recognise - the constitutional recognition campaign.

Voiced by BushTV Chairman Ernie Dingo this series had over a million views on ABC TV and social media.

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A series of short historical based documentaries featuring untold First Nations stories designed to gain momentum for Recognise - the constitutional recognition campaign. Voiced by BushTV Chairman Ernie Dingo this series had over a million views on ABC TV and social media.

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Written by Australian & international academics linked to their institutions and curated by professional editors.   It offers informed commentary and debate on diverse issues. https://theconversation.com/au
Sign up for the daily 5am email > https://theconversation.com/sign_up

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The Conversation: In-depth analysis, research, news and ideas from leading academics and researchers.

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Curated by professional editors, The Conversation offers informed commentary and debate on the issues affecting our world. Plus a Plain English guide to the latest developments and discoveries from the university and research sector.

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OECD  - Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

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OECD  - Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

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http://www.oecd.org/

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Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)

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The World Bank Open Knowledge Repository (OKR) is the World Bank’s official open access repository for its research outputs and knowledge products.
https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/

By extending and improving access to World Bank knowledge, the Bank aims to encourage innovation and allow anyone in the world to turn Bank knowledge into solutions to development problems that will help improve the lives of poor people around the world.

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Facebook has said being a signatory to Poynter's code of principles is a condition for being accepted as a third-party fact-checker on its network. Flickr/Esther Vargas, CC BY-SA

The Conversation's FactCheck unit has become the first fact-checking team in Australia and one of only two worldwide accredited by the International Fact-Checking Network, an alliance of fact-checkers hosted at the Poynter Institute in the US.

The only other fact-checking team accredited under this process is the Washington Post's Fact Checker.

The accreditation process is part of a broader effort by media outlets to restore reader trust in a world where anyone can claim the title FactCheck - whether or not they have approached the task in a fair, rigorous and impartial way.

Facebook has said being a signatory to a code of principles developed by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) at Poynter is a condition for being accepted as a third-party fact-checker on the social network. Facebook is partnering with news organisations in an effort to weed out so-called "fake news".

The accreditation means The Conversation's unique approach to fact checking has been assessed by an external panel as compliant with the code of fact-checker's principles, which require non-partisanship, fairness, transparency of funding, sources and methods, and a commitment to open and honest corrections.

Accredited organisations can use the International Fact-Checking Network's verification badge to demonstrate compliance with the principles.

Acclaim on behalf of the IFCN

In its application for verified status, The Conversation described its unique methodology, in which we ask academics with subject expertise to test claims by public figures against the evidence, and seek sources and comment from the person we are fact-checking. The draft is then blind reviewed by a second expert who doesn't know the identity of the lead author.

The external assessor described the The Conversation as "a refreshing combination of journalistic writing with academic expertise" and praised the peer-review process, commenting:

This gives it an additional layer of protection in the realm of fact-checking and presenting non-partisan information on a variety of key subjects to a worldwide audience... The Conversation's experts analyse the claims and then provide a "verdict" about whether the statement(s) was false, overstated or correct, noting the grey areas in how those facts may have been misinterpreted or misrepresented, which is an additional layer I found the public could find useful.

I have to say as a college professor (now) and journalist (then), this combination of fact-checking through an expert and peer-review is one of the more innovative models I have encountered or read about.

The Conversation's verified status is valid for one year, after which it will be reviewed. You can read more about the International Fact-Checking Network's admissions process here.

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The Conversation's FactCheck granted accreditation by International Fact-Checking Network at Poynter

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The Conversation's FactCheck unit has become the first fact-checking team in Australia and one of only two worldwide accredited by the International Fact-Checking Network, an alliance of fact-checkers hosted at the Poynter Institute in the US. The only other fact-checking team accredited under this process is the Washington Post's Fact Checker.

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Climate change threatens Australia in many different ways, and can devastate rural and urban communities alike. For Torres Strait Islanders, it's a crisis that's washing away their homes, infrastructure and even cemeteries.

The failure to take action on this crisis has led a group of Torres Strait Islanders to lodge a climate change case with the United Nations Human Rights Committee against the Australian federal government.

It's the first time the Australian government has been taken to the UN for their failure to take action on climate change. And its the first time people living on a low lying island have taken action against any government.

This case - and other parallel cases - demonstrate that climate change is " fundamentally a human rights issue ", with First Nations most vulnerable to the brunt of a changing climate.

The group of Torres Strait Islanders lodging this appeal argue that the Australian government has failed to take adequate action on climate change. They allege that the re-elected Coalition government has not only steered Australia off track in meeting globally agreed emissions reductions, but has set us on course for climate catastrophe.

In doing so, Torres Strait Islanders argue that the government has failed to uphold human rights obligations and violated their rights to culture, family and life.

This case is a show of defiance in the face of Australia's years of political inertia and turmoil over climate change.

It is the first time people living on a low-lying island - acutely vulnerable in the face of rising sea levels - have brought action against a government. But it may also be a sign of things to come, as more small island nations face impending climate change threats.

Breaching multiple human rights obligations

Driving this case is an alliance of eight Torres Strait Islanders, represented by the Torres Strait land and sea council, Gur A Baradharaw Kod, along with a legal team from ClientEarth and 350.org. They argue that their way of life has come under immediate and irreversible threat.

On this basis, they accuse the Australian government of breaching multiple articles of the UN Human Rights Declaration, including the right to culture, the right to be free from arbitrary interference with privacy, family and home, and the right to life.

In the early 1990s, the Torres Strait Islands were at the centre of struggles to secure Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land rights in Australia.

Securing these rights were made possible through the historic Mabo Decision, and these rights remain central to land and human rights debates today as Torres Strait Islanders' land and seas are threatened by climate change.

Torres Straight Islanders are on the frontlines

Some Torres Strait Islands are less than one metre above sea level and are already affected by climate change.

Rising tides have delivered devastating effects for local communities, including flooding homes, land and cultural sites, with dire flooding in 2018 breaking a sea wall built to protect local communities.

Shutterstock

Increasing sea temperatures have also affected marine environments, driving coral bleaching and ocean acidification, and disrupting habitat for dugong, salt water crocodiles, and multiple species of turtle.

In the same way settler colonial violence dispossessed First Nations people from their ancestral homelands, climate change presents a real threat of further forced removal of people from their land and seas, alongside destruction of places where deep cultural and spiritual meaning is derived.

Parallel threats across the Pacific

While the Torres Strait appeal to the UN is groundbreaking, the challenges facing Torres Strait Islanders are not unique.

Delegates at the Pacific Islands Forum in Fiji last week described climate change as the " single greatest threat" to the region, with sea level rise occurring up to four times the global average in some countries in the Pacific.

Climate change is already causing migration across parts of the Pacific, including relocation of families from the Carteret Islands to Bougainville with support from local grassroots organisation Tulele Peisa.

The Alliance of Small Island States, an intergovernmental organisation, has demanded that signatories to the Paris Agreement, including through the Green Climate Fund, recognise fundamental loss and damages communities are facing, and compensate those affected.

The growing wave of climate litigation

Across the Torres Strait, the Pacific, and other regions on the frontline of climate change, there are a diversity of responses in defence of land and seas. These are often grounded in local and Indigenous knowledge.

They show the resolve of First Nations and local communities, as captured in a message from the Pacific Climate Warriors:

We are not drowning. We are fighting.

There are parallel appeals to the Torres Strait Islanders' case. Around the world, First Nations people are calling on the UN to hold national governments to account on human rights obligations, including in the context of mining and other developments that drive greenhouse gas emissions.

In Australia, Wangan and Jagalingou Traditional Owners have submitted multiple appeals, including last year alleging government violations of six international human rights obligations in their effort to advance Adani's proposed Carmichael mine.

There is an array of other climate litigation underway. This includes citizens suing their governments for failing to take action on climate, such as in the Netherlands, where a judge ordered the government to take hefty action to reduce national emissions.

Similarly, a group of 21 children in the United States are pursuing a lawsuit to demand the right to a safe climate.

Given the parlous state of climate politics in Australia, further litigation can be expected. The significance of the current appeal by a group of Torres Strait Islanders lies in its potential to lay bare the adequacy or otherwise of Australia's response to climate change as a human rights issue.

First Nations people already have a moral authority in defending their human rights in the era of climate change. Over time, they and others, including children, will also test the grounds on which they might have the legal authority to do so.

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Torres Strait Islanders ask UN to hold Australia to account on climate 'human rights abuses'

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Climate change threatens Australia in many different ways, and can devastate rural and urban communities alike. For Torres Strait Islanders, it's a crisis that's washing away their homes, infrastructure and even cemeteries. The failure to take action on this crisis has led a group of Torres Strait Islanders to lodge a climate change case with the United Nations Human Rights Committee against the Australian federal government.

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https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/day-of-mourning

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Leaflet issued by Australia's 150th Anniversary Celebrations Council

Significance

The Day of Mourning was the first time Aboriginal activist groups from different states had fully cooperated.

According to the Dictionary of Sydney, 'it was, therefore, the first national Aboriginal civil rights gathering and represents the most clearly identifiable beginning of the contemporary Aboriginal political movement'.

While it may have seemed to be a protest that came out of the blue for many non-indigenous Australians, the political activity that culminated in the Day of Mourning in Sydney had been building for some time.

Aboriginal people had been organising and lobbying for some years to improve their conditions and rights, but with little tangible result. With a growing sense of despair, the decision was taken to organise the Day of Mourning.

Making it coincide with the sesquicentenary proved an effective way to bring attention to the multiple injustices done to Indigenous people in the course of Australia's history since European settlement.

Following the protest, Prime Minister Joseph Lyons and his wife Enid met with organisers. They spent two hours together, but nothing practical resulted.

Marking the Day of Mourning became an annual event for Indigenous people and their supporters. The Sunday before Australia Day was set aside, but over time, this was shifted to July and eventually evolved into NAIDOC week.

The Australian Hall has become very significant to Indigenous people, and is listed on the National Register of heritage places.

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1938: Sesquicentenary and Aboriginal Day of Mourning

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Terry Jenke True Tracks: create a culture of innovation with Indigenous knowledge 

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Terry Jenke True Tracks: create a culture of innovation with Indigenous knowledge 

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https://youtu.be/WfS11_Dl6ew

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True Tracks: create a culture of innovation with Indigenous knowledge | Terri Janke | TEDxJCUCairns

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https://www.slq.qld.gov.au/discover/aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-cultures-and-stories/languages

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aboriginal and torres strait islander map

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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages

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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language groups in Queensland are supported in the revival, documentation and preservation of traditional languages

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https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/about-library/services/indigenous-engagement

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The Indigenous Services team at the Library work to share and celebrate stories of Indigenous Australia and work closely with Indigenous communities.

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The 1938 Day of Mourning

On January 26 1938, while many Australians celebrated the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the landing of the First Fleet, a group of Aboriginal men and women gathered at Australia Hall in Sydney. They had come together to continue a struggle that had begun 150 years previously. They met to move the following resolution:

The first Day of Mourning was a culmination of years of work by the Australian Aborigines League (AAL) and the Aborigines Progressive Association (APA). It would became the inspiration for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander activism throughout the remainder of the twentieth century. In the early 1960s, both organisations would reform and reshape and become the driving force calling for a constitutional referendum that would take place in 1967.

The AAL was able to persuade many religious denominations to declare the Sunday before Australia Day as 'Aboriginal Sunday'. This was to serve as a reminder of the unjust treatment of Indigenous people. The first of these took place in 1940 and continued until 1955, when it moved to the first Sunday in July.

In 1957, with support and cooperation from federal and state governments, the churches and major Indigenous organisations, a National Aborigines Day Observance Committee (NADOC) was formed, which continues to this day as NAIDOC.

The Australian Aborigines League

The Australian Aborigines League was established in 1932 by William Cooper, a Yorta Yorta man and leader, who at age 71 took on the role of Honorary Secretary. The AAL membership included other prominent Aboriginal activists such as Margaret Tucker, Eric Onus and Shadrach James

After seeking permission from the Board of Protectors, and with limited means available that would enable broad reach, William Cooper circulated a petition across Australia throughout 1933 and 1934. The petition called upon the government to improve living conditions for Aboriginal people and to enact legislation that would guarantee Aboriginal representation in Parliament.

Cooper sent the petition to Prime Minister Joseph Lyons in an undated letter in August of 1937 in the hope that he would forward it to King George VI.

He wrote:

'Dear Mr. Lyons, ... I am forwarding you the petition, signed by 1814 people of the Aboriginal race, praying His Majesty the King to exercise the Royal Prerogative by intervening for the preservation of our race from extinction and to grant representation to our race in the Federal Parliament.'

While the government acknowledged receipt of the petition, they gave no indication that it would be forwarded to the King.

William Cooper's correspondence to Prime Minister Joseph Lyons regarding the Petition to the King, 'Representation of Aborigines in Commonwealth Parliament'. National Archives of Australia A431, 1949/1591, p.125.

The Aborigines Progressive Association

The Aborigines Progressive Association was launched in 1937 by William Ferguson and Jack Patten. The principal objectives of the APA were:

To conduct propaganda for the emancipation and betterment of Aboriginal people.

To take all steps which may be necessary to secure full citizen rights for Aboriginal people and repeal of restrictive legislation concerning Aboriginal people.

To examine all proposals concerning Aboriginal people from the point of Aboriginal people themselves and to formulate policies to place before the governments of Australia for Aboriginal betterment.

In early 1937, Ferguson made a public call for a Parliamentary Select Committee enquiry into the administration of the New South Wales Aborigines Protection Board. The inquiry began in November of that year with Ferguson appearing before it as 'a representative of the Aborigines of New South Wales'.

During the proceedings, Ferguson read out correspondence sent to the APA from Aboriginal people throughout New South Wales. These letters were scathing in their condemnation of the poor treatment of Aboriginal people by the Aborigines Protection Board.

Pastor Frank Roberts, a Bundjalung man from Tuncester, wrote:

'It is terrible. Words cannot express what is scandalous treatment by the Destruction Board...The Aborigines Protection Board made conditions so hard that I was forced to leave the settlement , and through persecution of the board...I am without a home'.[i]

We are eagles

On November 12 1937, William Cooper called a meeting of leading Aboriginal activists. Among the attendees were Doug Nicholls and William Ferguson.

The following day, details of the event were published on the front page of the Melbourne newspaper The Argus. At the meeting Cooper called for a Day of Mourning and protest in Sydney to be held on the following 26 of January.

'Plans for the observance of aborigine's throughout Australia of a 'Day of mourning' simultaneously with the 150th anniversary celebrations in Sydney, were announced by the Australian Aborigines League.

'"While white men are throwing their hats in the air with joy", said the chairman (Mr A.P.A. Burdeu), "aborigines will be in mourning for all that they have lost." It was hoped, Mr Burdeu added, that the Day of mourning would direct the attention of the people of Australia to the desire of the aborigines for full rights of citizenship.

'Stating that he was proud of his aboriginal blood, Mr William Ferguson said that the aborigines did not want protection.

"We have been 'protected' for 150 years, and look what has become of us."

'Mr Ferguson complained bitterly of the treatment of aborigines at aboriginal settlements in NSW. "It would be better for the authorities to turn a machine-gun on us," he said.

'Mr Douglas Nicholls,... said that aborigines were not satisfied merely to be kept alive by a weekly issue of rations. "We do not want chicken food," he said. "We are not chickens; we are eagles."'

In early January of 1938, Jack Patten and William Ferguson published the pamphlet titled Aborigines Claim Citizens Rights. The pamphlet described the conditions for Aboriginal people in Australia from their own perspective. It was published with the assistance of PR Stephensen, who also published the material in his own magazine The Publicists, and would later facilitate the publication of The Australian Abo Call.

One hundred and fifty years of so called 'progress'

'The 26th of January, 1938, is not a day of rejoicing for Australia's Aborigines; it is a day of mourning. This festival of 150 years' so-called "progress" in Australia commemorates also 150 years of misery and degradation imposed upon the original native inhabitants by the white invaders of this country.

'We, representing the Aborigines, now ask you, the reader of this appeal, to pause in the midst of your sesqui-centenary rejoicings and ask yourself honestly whether your "conscience" is clear in regard to the treatment of the Australian blacks by the Australian whites during the period of 150 years' history which you celebrate?'[ii]

'We are the old Australians'

'You are the New Australians, but we are the Old Australians. We have in our arteries the blood of the Original Australians, who have lived in this land for many thousands of years.'

'You came here only recently, and you took our land away from us by force. You have almost exterminated our people, but there are enough of us remaining to expose the humbug of your claim, as white Australians, to be a civilised, progressive, kindly and humane nation'.[iii]

In a prime time interview on radio station 2SM in Sydney, Jack Patten informed listeners that:

'...the time has come now, after one hundred and fifty years of so-called progress, for the white people of Australia to face up to their responsibilities...we now ask for freedom and equal citizenship. Our only hope of obtaining justice is to arouse the conscience of the white people of Australia, and to make them realise how lacking they have been in regard to accepting their responsibilities towards us, the original owners of the land.'[iv]

The stage was set for Aboriginal people from across Australia to gather in Sydney to highlight the plight of their people and to call for a better deal.

Surely the time has come

On January 26 1938, Sydney awoke to a warm, sunny day. A series of events and activities had been organised to mark the sesquicentenary anniversary.

For those who celebrated, there was a parade, a sailing regatta and a lawn bowls tournament. One of the feature events of the day was a re-enactment of the arrival of the First Fleet. A group of Aboriginal men from Menindee, in far-west New South Wales, were brought to Sydney to act in the role of the original Eora peoples of Port Jackson.

Those who mourned and had little reason to celebrate were kept waiting until the parade passed by. Only then could they march in silent protest from Town Hall to Australian Hall in Elizabeth Street. Once they arrived, the protestors were required to use the back entrance to access the building. On that hot January day, members of the APA wore formal black dress as a symbolic sign of mourning.

First national meeting of Aboriginal people for citizenship rights

With the sesquicentenary parade delaying the marchers, the meeting did not start until 1.30 that afternoon. Jack Patten chaired the meeting and was joined on stage by Bill Ferguson, Doug Nicholls, William Cooper and Jack Kinchela.

About a hundred people attended including Margaret Tucker, Selina Patten (Jack's wife), Pearl Gibbs, Jack Johnson, Mrs F. Ardler, Bert Marr, Frank Roberts, Tom Peckham, Henry Noble, Jack Kinchella, Bert Groves, Ted Duncan, Robert McKenzie, Louisa Agnes Ingram, Doris Williams and Tom Foster. Helen Grosvenor served as minute taker.

Only four non-aboriginal people were allowed to attend; two policemen as well as Russell Clark from Man magazine and PR Stephensen.

Jack Patten was the first speaker:

'On this day the white people are rejoicing, but we, as Aborigines, have no reason to rejoice on Australia's 150th birthday. Our purpose in meeting today is to bring home to the white people of Australia the frightful conditions in which the native Aborigines of this continent live.

'This land belonged to our forefathers 150 years ago, but today we are pushed further and further into the background. The Aborigines Progressive Association has been formed to put before the white people the fact that Aborigines throughout Australia are literally being starved to death.

'We refuse to be pushed into the background. We have decided to make ourselves heard. White men pretend that the Australian Aboriginal is a low type, who cannot be bettered. Our reply to that is, "Give us the chance!" We do not wish to be left behind in Australia's march to progress. We ask for full citizen rights..."[v]

William Ferguson was the next speaker to rise:

'We have been waiting and waiting all our lives for the white people of Australia to better our conditions, but we have waited in vain. We have been living in a fool's paradise.

'I have travelled outback and I have seen for myself the dreadful sufferings of our people on the Aborigines Reserves...Surely the time has come at last for us to do something for ourselves, and make ourselves heard. This is why the Aborigines Progressive Association has been formed.'[vi]

Dough Nichols spoke on behalf of the Aboriginal people of Victoria:

'...I want say that we support this resolution in every way. The public does not realise what our people have suffered for 150 years.

'Aboriginal girls have been sent to Government Reserves and have not been given any opportunity to improve themselves. Their treatment has been disgusting. The white people have nothing for us whatever... Now is our chance to have things altered. We must fight our very hardest in this cause.'[vii]

Mr Connelly, from the south coast of New South Wales highlighted the dispossession suffered by his people:

'In 150 years the white men have taken away the hunting grounds and camping grounds of our people, and left us with nothing. We must have unity among ourselves or we will not succeed in the uplifting of our race. ...

'On behalf of the Aborigines of the South Coast, I want to thank the men who have started this great movement of Aborigines Progress. If we are to succeed we must be united. Let us fight on to a successful end.'[viii]

Pearl Gibbs was the last speaker of the day and recalled with passion her meeting with some of the Aboriginal elders:

'Conditions on all the Aboriginal stations are a disgrace. They are all very much alike. At Brewarrina the children are taught by a man who is not a qualified teacher. Two old men on that station, one blind, the other a cripple, are left by themselves in a half-starved state. I spoke to these old men, and when they told me how badly they were treated it made me cry, and pray that this movement will be a success.'

The last item on the agenda for the day was the election of office bearers. Jack Patten was returned as president, Helen Grosvenor was elected secretary, William Ferguson was re-elected organising secretary and Jack Kinchela became treasurer.

This ended the first national meeting of Aboriginal people for citizenship rights. The protest and conference received some coverage in the national press with many newspapers giving grudging acknowledgement to the grievances and concerns aired at the meeting.

Although the gathering held on 26 January in 1938 brought about little actual change at the time, it was a turning point in the evolution of a national struggle by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to gain the same rights as those held by all other Australians.

Beyond the Day of Mourning

The following week, on 31 January 1938, a deputation of about 20 people met with the Prime Minister, Joseph Lyons, his wife Enid as well as the Minister for the Interior, John McEwen (whose Department held responsibility for Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory), to present a proposed national policy for Aboriginal people. Among the deputation were John Patten, William Ferguson, Mrs D Anderson, Helen Grosvenor, Pearl Gibbs and her mother, and Tom Foster.

They called for Commonwealth control of all Aboriginal matters, with a separate Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs; an administration advised by a board of six, at least three of whom were to be Aboriginal people nominated by the Aborigines Progressive Association; and full citizen status for all Aboriginal people and civil equality with white Australians, including equality in education, labour laws, workers compensation, pensions, land ownership and wages. Lyons replied that, under the Constitution, Commonwealth control was not possible.

In early February, Pearl Gibbs addressed a meeting of the Housewives' Progressive Association:

'You white people awoke on Anniversary Day with a feeling of pride at what you had done...but did you not think of the Aborigine's broken hearts, and that for them it was a day of mourning?

'What has any white man or woman done in this country to help my people, the Aborigines? The Aborigines are now taking up the matter for themselves and asking for citizenship. It is not ridiculous or silly for them to ask for citizenship in a country that is their own.'[ix]

Three months after the Day of Mourning the first issue of The Australian Abo Call appeared on newsstands. Edited by Jack Patten, the publication proclaimed itself the 'the voice of the Aborigines' and continued to demand for rights and equality for Aboriginal people. The first issue noted that:

'The Abo Call is our own paper. It has been established to present the case for [A]borigines, from the point of view of the Aborigines themselves.'

The Australian Abo Call reported on the poor living conditions faced by many Aboriginal people and attempted to dispel the notion of peaceful European colonisation. Unfortunately, the publicationwas short-lived and only lasted for six issues from April to September 1938.

The Day of Mourning protest did succeed in raising some awareness about the conditions faced by many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

As one correspondent to The Katoomba Daily noted:

'Excessive self-glorification, unaccompanied by any self-examination of our many past follies and injustices, does not evince a high degree of moral development... The past cannot be undone, but let us not continue to withhold justice.'[x]

In November 1940 William Cooper retired as Honorary Secretary of the Australian Aborigines League. Sadly he passed away in 1941. The AAL continued under the guiding hand of Doug Nicholl and Bill Onus. In the 1960s the organisation changed its name to the Aborigines Advancement League.

The Aborigines Progressive Association remained active until 1944. However, political differences between William Ferguson and Jack Patten led to an internal split in the organisation shortly after the events of January 26.

Despite the split both factions continued the struggle for equal rights for Aboriginal people. The APA was revived in the early 1960s by Bert Groves and Pearl Gibbs. Many of its members would be instrumental in advocating for the 1967 Referendum.

References

[i] Select Committee on Administration of Aborigines Protection Board 'Proceedings of the Committee Minutes of Evidence and Exhibits'. Sydney: Legislative Assembly of New South Wales, 1938, p. 55.

[ii] 'Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights!: A Statement of the Case for the Aborigines Progressive Association', the Publicist, 1938, p. 3.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Stephensen, PR (Percy Reginald). Papers, 1936-1942 Re Aborigines Citizenship Committee and Aborigines Progressive Association together with records of the Publicist Publishing Co. W & F Pascoe, 1936.

Further reading
Books
Aborigines Advancement League (Victoria), Victims or Victors: The Story of the Aborigines Advancement League , South Yarra, Vic, Hyland House, 1985.

Attwood, Bain, Rights for Aborigines, Crows Nest, N.S.W. : Allen & Unwin, 2003.

Attwood, Bain, and Markus, Andrew, The struggle for Aboriginal rights: a documentary history, NSW, Allen and Unwin, 1999.

Attwood, Bain and Marcus, Andrew, Thinking Black: William Cooper and Australian Aborigines' League, Canberra, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 2004.

Broome, Richard, Aboriginal Victorians: a history since 1800, Crows Nest, N.S.W. : Allen & Unwin, 2005.

Clark, Mavis Thopre, The boy from Cumeroogunga, Sydney : Hodder & Stoughton, 1979.

Cooper, William, Blood from a stone : William Cooper and the Australian Aborigines League / edited, with an introduction by Andrew Markus, Clayton, Vic.:Monash Publications in History, 1986.

Gammage, Bill and Spearitt,Peter, eds, Australians 1938, Sydney, Farfax, Syme and Weldon Associates, 1987.

Goodall, Heather, Invasion to Embassy : Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770-1972, Sydney University Press, 2008.

Horner, Jack, Bill Ferguson : fighter for Aboriginal freedom / a biography by Jack Horner, Dickson, A.C.T.:Jack Horner, 1994.

Horner, Jack, Vote Ferguson for Aboriginal freedom, Australian and New Zealand Book Co. 1974.

Heiss, Anita, ed., Life in Gadigal country, Marrickville, N.S.W. : Gadigal Information Service Aboriginal Corporation, 2002.

Maynard, John. Fight for Liberty and Freedom  : The Origins of Australian Aboriginal Activism. Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007.

Manuscripts

MS 1515 (finding aid) Gribble, E.R.B. (Ernest Richard Bulmer), 1869-1957, Collected papers, 1892-1970.

MS 2022 Horner, Jack, Aboriginal social and political affairs of 1938, especially the Day of Mourning meeting, January 1938 and the Prime Ministers deputation.

MS 4112 (finding aid) Horner, Jack, Jack Horner's research notebooks on the life and times of Bill Ferguson.

MS 2368 (finding aid) Pink, Olive, Papers of Olive Muriel Pink.

Select Committee on Administration of Aborigines Protection Board: Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence and Exhibits. Sydney: Legislative Assembly of New South Wales, 1938
Rare pamphlets and serials
Aborigines Progressive Association, Australian Aborigines Conference sesqui-centenary day of mourning and protest to be held in the Australian Hall, Sydney, 1938.

Patten, J.T. and Ferguson, W., Aborigines claim citizen rights! : a statement of the case for the Aborigines Progressive Association, Sydney: The Publicist, 1938.

The Australian Abo call: the voice of the Aborigines.
Articles and book chapters
Aborigines meet, mourn while white-man nation celebrates, Man Magazine, March 1938, pp. 84-85.

Aborigines petition the King - 1937, Churinga, Vol. 1, no. 12 May 1970, pp. 27- 35.

Horner, Jack and Langton, Marcia, The Day of Mourning, p. 28-35, in Bill Gammage and Peter Spearitt (eds), Australians 1938, Fairfax, Syme and Weldon, Broadway, 1987.

Markus, Andrew, William Cooper and the 1937 petition to the King, in 'Aboriginal History' Vol. 7 no. 1. 1983 pp. 46-60.

McGregor, Russell, Protest and Progress: Aboriginal Activism in the 1930s, in 'Australian Historical Studies' 25, no. 101 (October 1, 1993), pp. 555-68.

Maynard, John, Vision, Voice and Influence: The Rise of the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association, in 'Australian Historical Studies' 34, no. 121 (April 1, 2003), pp. 91-105.
Microforms
MF 311, Papers, 1936-1942 [microform]: re Aborigines Citizenship Committee and Aborigines Progressive Association, together with records of The Publicist Publishing Co. / Percy Reginald Stephensen.

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The 1938 Day of Mourning On January 26 1938, while many Australians celebrated the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the landing of the First Fleet, a group of Aboriginal men and women gathered at Australia Hall in Sydney. They had come together to continue a struggle that had begun 150 years previously.