Prepared by Brock Library Research Lifecycle Department
A yearly check-in of some scholarly publishing dynamics at Brock University over the 2025/2026 academic year. This report is published as part of Open Access Week 2026 celebrations. You can find previous reports on our Publishing Guide.
Over the course of July 1, 2025 to June 30, 2026 a total of: 921 articles were published by Brock Researchers.
We can divide all journal articles into two categories: Open Access or Closed. The Brock Library website explains the dynamics of these differences but the most important detail is that Open Access articles are available to readers without any payment! Sometimes a journal charges an article processing charge (APC) to make an article Open Access. This happens for both closed journals with some Open Access content and for totally Open Access journals.
Sometimes it is possible to publish an earlier version of a closed journal article in a place like the Brock University Digital Repository to have it become Open Access. We call this having a Green Open Access Pathway.
Does this sound confusing? Well it is. The following graph show the proportion of closed and Open Access articles published by Brock researchers.
We can now examine the different colours of Open Access journals published. The pie graph below shows the breakdown of these categories. The library website has a description of what these colours mean. In short, diamond is the best colour of Open Access as it is free to read, and free to write. No fees are charged for authors who produce content, and there are no subscription fees to read the content. One of the long term goals of librarianship is to convert all Open Access titles to diamond.
When publishing in a closed journal there is often something called a green pathway that will allow the author to either buy out Open Access rights to the article or to allow them to deposit a certain version of their article to the Brock University Digital Repository. The breakdown of what Green pathways exist for Brock author is shown in the following pie graphs.
This means that there is a free way to make 85 closed articles Open Access!
The library has developing a program to contact Brock affliated authors of these articles to encourage them to submit an eligible version into the Brock Digital Repository to achieve Open Access. All researchers will need to is copy and paste the DOI of their paper and upload a PDF copy to a form.
The library will be contacting the authors of closed articles that are eligible with details about how to freely make their articles available.
As described some publishers enable Open Access through the payment of an additional Article Processing Charge (APC). This is on top of regular subscription costs that the library already pays to get access to the journal. Sometimes this fee is paid by a research grant, sometimes directly by the researcher. Since research teams span different organizations APC payments might also span different organizations, so it is fair to say these fees weren’t all paid out by Brock researchers directly. Some of these fees might of come from Transformative Agreements. All figures below are in CAD.
It is difficult to navigate through all of the components involved with APCs. Brock now has an APC Discount & Waiver Viewer that will help explain what titles you can receive relief on. Sometimes there is a full discount! Below is example of the information that that is shown for a journal title.
Let’s take a closer look at our 921 articles to see if we can find any interesting nuggets.
Some journal titles are popular with Brock Authors.
Some publishers also rank high in popularity.
Are these popular publishers producing open access content? We can combine a few things now to see just how open our top publishers are.
We can also discover some interesting details by examining some other characteristics about journal publication metadata. For example, we can see if Brock researchers are collaborating with international partners. Below is graph that shows how many international collaborations there were in the 921 articles.
Since this report is the second of its kind we can track the difference from last year to this year. Looking at number of publications, dollars spent on APCs, and availability of free green pathways we can see the start of some trends.
The library has created a Research Insights Dashboard that keeps track of even more statistics on Brock publishing. Please check it out.
Please consult our guide that will help you understand how to get the most exposure for your published research. Most importantly you should create an ORCID iD and add Brock as your affiliation. These steps are outlined in the guide. When you publish be sure to share your ORCID iD with the journal and your content will automatically get included in this analysis.
This data is built with a few assumptions involved and outlined below
Notebooks and data used to compile this report are freely available online. If you have an idea for what to add to this report please get in touch.
The data in this analysis was sourced from
Read the article from Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication about the 2025 version of this report
Please contact Tim Ribaric Scholarly Publishing and Platforms Librarian if you have questions or ideas for this report