The Accessibility of Published Research in AERA Journals,2010–2022

Abstract

Background:

Sharing educational research publicly is a widely held professional value, intended to advance the societal use of research and honor public investment. However, many practitioners, policymakers, and researchers in under-resourced institutions lack access to paywalled journals, which limits the potential impact of educational scholarship. Although prior research indicates that only about 28% of all scholarly articles are openly accessible, the specific landscape within the field of education, particularly in journals published by prominent organizations like the American Educational Research Association (AERA), requires a more detailed examination.

Purpose:

This study provides a descriptive portrait of how widespread public access is for research published in AERA journals. The analysis was guided by three central questions: First, what percentage of articles published in AERA journals between 2010 and 2022 are publicly accessible via the internet? Second, what versions of these articles (e.g., pre-print, published version, open-access licensed) are available? Third, which online platforms are most commonly used to share these articles?

Research Design:

We used a public internet data mining approach to analyze all articles (N = 2,516) published in six non–open access AERA journals from 2010 to 2022. We utilized the SerpAPI service to systematically query Google Scholar and determine the accessibility of each article. To identify the version of each accessible file, we qualitatively coded a random sample of 250 files and used logistic regression models to make inferences about the entire population of accessible files. Finally, we analyzed the domains of the accessible files to identify the most common sharing platforms.

Conclusions:

We found that 65.0% of articles published in non–open access AERA journals were publicly accessible in some form, a rate higher than that of the broader scholarly literature. Most accessible files were the final published version (estimated 51.9%–64.0%), often found on commercial platforms like ResearchGate, while fewer were pre-prints (16.1%–26.1%) or had a formal open-access license (3.5%–9.4%). Although these findings are encouraging, significant gaps in access remain, highlighting a tension in the current publishing system. We conclude by joining calls for researchers, institutions, and AERA to continue advocating for and expanding open access to scholarly work.