Generally a scientific article's intellectual property and use policy are covered by a regular "full copyright" licence. If specified, an author can use one of the Creative Commons (CC) licences instead: original creators can choose to give up some rights, and this allows other researchers to use the published data in different ways. Some of these CC's (CC-BY, CC-BY-SA) respect the "Open Definition" and help speeding up the citations and consequently the overall research process.
First, on the first research we had some fun comparing different queries: "articles", "subject", "journal license", "year of publication", choosing results from 2010 to 2014. Then we picked up all subject related data and sorted it by kind of licence. We then calculated each subject percentages in order to compare them.
Then we went on DOAJ, one of the biggest Open Access journals repository, and searched for articles and journals licences, and the research outcomes were compared to the ones of Ulrich Herch's own research from February 2014 in order to see how the situation evolved.
The radars collect data about different kinds of copyright; they are divided into Open (CC-BY, CC-BY-SA), Not Open (CC-BY-NC-ND, CC-BY-NC, CC-BY-NC-SA, CC-BY-ND) and not CC (meaning they are under another kind of copyright). Each of the eight radar corners represents a different subject field, with scientific ones on the left and liberal arts on the right. The radars are on a 70% scale, and they show the distribution of different copyrights in different fields.
In the second chart, circles represent the distribution of different licences at the beginning of 2014 and at the end of 2015, and it shows the progression of the phenomenon.
From the radars you can see these changes in a more specific way, analising each of the subjects progression in the last five years. You can immediately see that human sciences prefer a regular copyright while scientific subjects prefer open licences. Two notable cases are medicine, whose openness growth was terrificly limited from 2013, and law, which grew by 24% in 2014 from the previous year in not open rights.
From the second visualisation you can notice how CC copyrighted articles have increased in numbers lately, with a special mention to the 5% increase of CC-BY licence.
