Using PubMed’s "Limits" tab, it is easy to filter searches by
date of publication, and also by whether an article has a link to an
online full text, and whether that online full text is freely available.

One
handy side effect of this is that it is possible to search PubMed for
articles in the last 60 days, and to calculate an Open Access Quotient to quantify just how open a
particular research field is – i.e. what fraction of the research in that
area is available with open access immediately following publication.

The OAQ for PubMed as a whole currently stands at 6.8%, but this overall figure conceals major variation between fields.

 

Is there a research area with a higher Open Access Quotient than malaria? Why not help us find out?

We’ll send an "I’m Open" BioMed Central T-shirt to whoever can identify the biomedical field with the highest Open Access Quotient (and we’d also be interested to know what fields seem to have the lowest).

To qualify, a PubMed Search should be based on conceptual keywords (not author or journal names) and should return at least 100 articles which have online fulltexts published in the last 60 days

Send your findings to blog@biomedcentral.com, or post them as comments to this blog item.

Update

Enter one or more keywords in the box below to calculate OAQ for a given topic: