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Updated: Apr 25, 2026

At-Risk Butterfly Captive Propagation Programs to Enhance Life History Knowledge and Effective Ex Situ Conservation Techniques

At-Risk Butterfly Captive Propagation Programs to Enhance Life History Knowledge and Effective Ex Situ Conservation Techniques

Published on: February 11, 2020

Achieving open access to conservation science.

Richard A Fuller¹, Jasmine R Lee, James E M Watson

¹School of Biological Sciences, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia. r.fuller@uq.edu.au.

Conservation Biology : the Journal of the Society for Conservation Biology

|August 28, 2014

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Conservation science research is largely inaccessible, with less than 5% of studies being open access. This hinders rapid application of findings by practitioners. Authors and publishers should adopt more open access models.

Keywords:

communications comunicación ethics filantropía financiamiento funding gobernanza governance philanthropy policy política ética

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Area of Science:

Conservation Science
Ecology
Environmental Management

Background:

Conservation science is a critical field requiring rapid dissemination of research findings for effective management.
Accessibility of scientific research is crucial for practitioners, especially in a crisis discipline.

Purpose of the Study:

To assess the public availability and open access status of scientific research published in conservation science journals since 2000.
To compare the accessibility of conservation science literature with that of evolutionary biology journals.

Main Methods:

Analysis of 19,207 papers published in 20 conservation science journals from 2000 onwards.
Examination of the percentage of papers freely downloadable from official repositories.
Assessment of papers meeting the standard definition of open access (free reuse with attribution).

Main Results:

Only 8.68% of analyzed conservation science papers are freely downloadable, and 4.88% are open access.
This accessibility is significantly lower compared to evolutionary biology journals (31.93% freely downloadable, 7.49% open access).
Despite 17 of 20 journals offering an open access option, fewer than 5% of papers utilize it.

Conclusions:

The limited open access in conservation science poses a barrier to practitioners, potentially costing millions to make all research freely available.
Authors are urged to opt for open access publication, and publishers should explore cost-effective open access models.
Initiatives like Research4Life are vital for providing access to developing countries, but broader solutions are needed.