Investigating Global Trends in Open Access: The Influence of Policies, Culturalization, and Funds on the Future of Iran's Scientific Position

Previous research has shown that the number of open access documents in the world is increasing. Although the speed of this phenomenon is worthy of attention, some supporters of science want this process to be faster. One of the important challenges of open access for the country is to cover its relatively high costs, and along with that, due to sanctions, it is also important to predict the methods of paying these costs. Anticipating the necessary arrangements in this field, including credit provision, policy making and cultural building, requires knowledge of the speed of progress of free access in the world. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate the trend of open access development worldwide and its impact on Iran's international scientific standing and to provide solutions in this field.

This research is an applied and survey-based study, conducted with a bibliometric approach. The study population consists of the data on 23 years of golden open access obtained from Clarivate and Incites.

The trend towards open access publishing is expected to continue in the most prestigious journals worldwide in the next 10 to 13 years. However, the growth rate of this trend is not uniform across all fields. The findings indicate that over the past five years, Iran ranks fifth among the countries with the lowest percentage of open access documents. This is happening while the share of open access documents is increasing rapidly in most countries. Also, major publishers are rapidly increasing their share of open access documents. Additionally, while journals with higher impact factors tend to publish more open access documents, the proportion of open access documents in journals with different citation degrees is relatively consistent.

The future of open access will be affected by the approach of financial sponsors in science, publishers and universities and research centers, but sooner or later a large part of the articles will be published as open access, an issue that will affect the future of the country's scientific position, especially with regard to financial dimensions. It will have a significant impact. The development of international scientific interactions, the development of interactions with financial sponsors of international science, policy-making, cultural creation and funding are the solutions facing this phenomenon. The formation of a consortium to pay the cost of processing articles as a unit at the country level and the formation of a consortium that includes both the subscription of databases and the payment of the cost of processing articles are among the solutions that increase the possibility of bargaining with publishers. Adding the country's science and technology funds to this consortium will increase the possibility of bargaining again.