scholarly journals Open access levels: a quantitative exploration using Web of Science and oaDOI data

Author(s):  
Jeroen Bosman ◽  
Bianca Kramer

Across the world there is growing interest in open access publishing among researchers, institutions, funders and publishers alike. It is assumed that open access levels are growing, but hitherto the exact levels and patterns of open access have been hard to determine and detailed quantitative studies are scarce. Using newly available open access status data from oaDOI in Web of Science we are now able to explore year-on-year open access levels across research fields, languages, countries, institutions, funders and topics, and try to relate the resulting patterns to disciplinary, national and institutional contexts. With data from the oaDOI API we also look at the detailed breakdown of open access by types of gold open access (pure gold, hybrid and bronze), using universities in the Netherlands as an example. There is huge diversity in open access levels on all dimensions, with unexpected levels for e.g. Portuguese as language, Astronomy & Astrophysics as research field, countries like Tanzania, Peru and Latvia, and Zika as topic. We explore methodological issues and offer suggestions to improve conditions for tracking open access status of research output. Finally, we suggest potential future applications for research and policy development. We have shared all data and code openly.

Author(s):  
Jeroen Bosman ◽  
Bianca Kramer

Across the world there is growing interest in open access publishing among researchers, institutions, funders and publishers alike. It is assumed that open access levels are growing, but hitherto the exact levels and patterns of open access have been hard to determine and detailed quantitative studies are scarce. Using newly available open access status data from oaDOI in Web of Science we are now able to explore year-on-year open access levels across research fields, languages, countries, institutions, funders and topics, and try to relate the resulting patterns to disciplinary, national and institutional contexts. With data from the oaDOI API we also look at the detailed breakdown of open access by types of gold open access (pure gold, hybrid and bronze), using universities in the Netherlands as an example. There is huge diversity in open access levels on all dimensions, with unexpected levels for e.g. Portuguese as language, Astronomy & Astrophysics as research field, countries like Tanzania, Peru and Latvia, and Zika as topic. We explore methodological issues and offer suggestions to improve conditions for tracking open access status of research output. Finally, we suggest potential future applications for research and policy development. We have shared all data and code openly.


2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingrid Cutler ◽  
Tormod Strømme ◽  
Irene Eikefjord

See video of the presentation.In 2013 The University of Bergen established a publication fund to cover the costs for publishing Open Access. The fund covers Article Processing Charges (APC) in both Open Access journals and hybrid Open Access in subscription journals. The publication fund at The University of Bergen is one of few in Norway that includes support for hybrid Open Access. The hybrid model is controversial because the publisher receives income twice for the same article, first through APC and then through subscriptions.The arguments for including hybrid were: (1) there are more journals to choose from, hence giving more researchers the opportunity and initiative to publish Open Access. (2) the quality issue of Open Access journals. The University believed that by including hybrid more articles would be published Open Access in renowned journals. This because a larger percentage of hybrid journals are registered on level 2 in the Norwegian System for defining quality of publication channels.The fund has been a success in so far that it has led to an increase in Open Access articles in high quality journals, also within research fields that traditionally do not publish Open Access. The fund has granted applications for almost 9 million NOK. Of a total of 437 granted applications, 278 (64 %) are articles in hybrid journals. 103 articles (24 %) have been published on level 2; 11 in Open Access-journals and 92 hybrid.When it comes to research field, the results show that about 90 % of granted applications come from researchers within medicine, psychology and the natural sciences, including many fields that already have a tradition for publishing their research Open Access. The fund has only led to a slight increase in Open Access publishing with APC within the humanities, social sciences and law.Researchers are happy with hybrid publishing because they are able to continue publishing in the same journals as before. It is also the case that support of hybrid publishing results in more Open Access articles in high quality journals according to the Norwegian system. Yet, support for hybrid publishing has so far not altered which research fields that publish Open Access, although there has been an increase of Open Access publications within all faculties.Our presentation will form a basis for discussing a number of questions pertaining to the hybrid model: What have the academic and economic consequences of the hybrid model been? Do all researchers at the University have the same opportunity to publish their research Open Access? Has support of hybrid lead to more Open Access in renowned publication channels?The University has appointed a group to evaluate the publication fund and recommend if and how it shall continue. Will the fund continue to support hybrid after the trial period ends in 2015?


2009 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
F.W. Dulle ◽  
M.K. Minishi-Majanja

This research explored the awareness, usage and perspectives of Tanzanian researchers on open access as a mode of scholarly communication. A survey questionnaire targeted 544 respondents selected through stratified random sampling from a population of 1088 university researchers of the six public universities in Tanzania. With a response rate of 73%, the data were analysed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences. The study reveals that the majority of the researchers were aware of and were positive towards open access. Findings further indicate that the majority of researchers in Tanzanian public universities used open access outlets more to access scholarly content than to disseminate their own research findings. It seems that most of these researchers would support open access publishing more if issues of recognition, quality and ownership were resolved. Thus many of them supported the idea of establishing institutional repositories at their respective universities as a way of improving the dissemination of local content. The study recommends that public universities and other research institutions in the country should consider establishing institutional repositories, with appropriate quality assurance measures, to improve the dissemination of research output emanating from these institutions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 109 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anson Parker ◽  
Abbey Heflin ◽  
Lucy Carr Jones

As part of a larger project to understand the publishing choices of UVA Health authors and support open access publishing, a team from the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library analyzed an open data set from Europe PMC, which includes metadata from PubMed records. We used the Europe PMC REST API to search for articles published in 2017–2020 with “University of Virginia” in the author affiliation field. Subsequently, we parsed the JSON metadata in Python and used Streamlit to create a data visualization from our public GitHub repository. At present, this shows the relative proportions of open access versus subscription-only articles published by UVA Health authors. Although subscription services like Web of Science, Scopus, and Dimensions allow users to do similar analyses, we believe this is a novel approach to doing this type of bibliometric research with open data and open source tools.  


Author(s):  
Shaghayegh Abdolahzadeh ◽  
Peter G. Braun ◽  
Christina Elsenga ◽  
Marijke Folgering-van der Vliet ◽  
Babette Knauer ◽  
...  

The academic landscape of the Netherlands has been influenced in recent years by new governmental policies regarding open access and open science, national and European legal guidelines, developments in ICT, and changes in how researchers are assessed. The University of Groningen Library (UB) has seized the opportunity in these developments, providing research support in the domains of registration and archiving of research output, open access publishing, research data management, and research analytics. Increased efficiency in traditional library procedures and the introduction of project-based funding have provided staff capacity for these developments. Full-service customization, to meet the needs of researchers and alleviate their time and work pressure, lies at the heart of the UB's research support.


2021 ◽  
pp. 146144482110466
Author(s):  
Sofie Flensburg ◽  
Stine Lomborg

A growing body of research centers around the concept of “datafication” suggesting a buzz around data studies and, perhaps, the emergence of a research field. This article analyzes and discusses the current state of datafication research. Our dataset comprises 463 publications on datafication identified through a systematic literature search in Web of Science and Scopus, an explorative network analysis of keyword co-occurrences and a content analysis of these publications. We map datafication research interests in various research fields, find that the majority of studies are theoretically oriented, whereas empirical analyses largely apply qualitative approaches and rarely make use of data-driven methods. We suggest studies on datafication can be devised into categories reflecting research interests in either user understandings and practices or in infrastructure and technological processes of datafication. The latter strand is particularly sparse in empirical anchoring, and needs empirical and methodological attention. We conclude by outlining three paths for future datafication research to cross-pollinate infrastructural and user perspectives, highlighting the bridging role of communication research in such an endeavor.


2021 ◽  
pp. 096100062110095
Author(s):  
Saimah Bashir ◽  
Sumeer Gul ◽  
Shazia Bashir ◽  
Nahida Tun Nisa ◽  
Shabir Ahmad Ganaie

The article tries to highlight the evolution and conceptual framework of institutional repositories and their impact on the academic and scholarly circles in terms of better visibility, wider audience and earlier communication of research. The characteristics associated with the institutional repositories are also highlighted, which makes them stand out from the crowd in the family of open access scholarly platforms. The study is based on the examination and evaluation of the articles published across various peer-reviewed journals showcasing numerous dimensions of institutional repositories, ranging from their evolution to open scholarly acceptance. A preliminary search on institutional repositories was carried through two well-renowned indexing/abstracting databases of peer-reviewed literature, Clarivate Analytic’s, Web of Science and Elsevier’s Scopus. Search terms like institutional repositories, institutional research output, open access repositories, green open access, open access, open access publishing, open access initiatives, digital libraries, directory of open access repositories, open DOAR and scholarly communication were run across the databases for article retrieval, and the relevant studies were extracted accordingly. To make the study more comprehensive and current, the studies citing the retrieved articles were also consulted. The study reveals that the benefits associated with institutional repositories are manifold. They recounter users with the information which was otherwise unavailable due to the reasons ranging from the non-availability of supplementary information (like unpublished reports and working papers, multimedia and audiovisual items, learning objects, other special item types, bibliographic references, datasets, lecture notes and so forth) to the paywall/subscription models adopted by commercial channels of scholarly communication. Furthermore, the social, research and technological factors tend to be the main motivating factors for their wider acceptance by the scholarly community at global, national, organizational, and individual levels. They enhance the preservation of institutional research output with increased viewership and prestige apart from achieving a potential research impact. They, in a real sense, have abrogated the unilateral assault orchestrated by the commercial publishers on the author community by democratizing their scholarly voices via open and barrierless scholarly platforms. They are the future of the academic output of an institution/author as they perform successfully within the constitutional boundaries of scholarly and academic publishing, thus safeguarding the rights and claims of every academic actor. Given the importance of institutional repositories for a more democratic, barrierless and impactful information communication, they are for sure going beyond various scholarly circles by breaking the traditional and rigid walls of scholarly endeavours. The study presents a useful overview of the progression of the institutional repositories, their intended purpose and how they serve to fill the gaps in scholarly publishing and meet the needs of the wider academic community. The article summarizes in one place a concise overview of the use and impact of institutional repositories. The study is also an eye-opener for scholars interested in the research in the field of institutional repositories.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Norris

We could all benefit from our research and the research of others being more transparent and accessible to all, regardless of our career stage or research field. ‘Open Science’ provides us with a range of research practices designed to make the processes, data, analysis and outputs more reproducible, understandable and accessible. These practices range from making the protocol of your research explicit and publicly available via study pre-registration or Registered Report, to making a final published paper freely available via Open Access publishing or pre-print. This chapter will outline issues and challenges in research that Open Science helps to reduce. It will outline what Open Science is and how it can be integrated into your research workflow and summarise some global initiatives to increase Open Science uptake. The chapter will end by discussing how Open Science can benefit and accelerate your career and give you some tips on how to get started.


2019 ◽  
Vol 97 (Supplement_3) ◽  
pp. 23-24
Author(s):  
Teresa A Davis

Abstract A group of European funding agencies launched an initiative called “Plan S” in September 2018 that would require scientific publications resulting from funded research to be published only in Plan S-compliant open access journals by 2020. A delegation from the European Commission visited the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and other federal agencies in December 2018 to gain support for Plan S. Plan S would force authors to publish solely in open access journals and bar researchers from publishing in hybrid journals, such as the Journal of Animal Science, that allow authors to choose between Gold and Green Open Access publishing. Gold Open Access allows immediate open access with articles made freely available at time of publication and requires payment of article processing charges that are usually higher than page charges of subscription-based journals. Green Open Access publishing is subscription-based and defers open access for the publisher embargo period (usually 12 months). Because 85% of journals are hybrid or subscription based, Plan S would limit researcher’s academic freedom to decide where to publish and prevent authors from publishing in most research society journals that are hybrid or subscription-based. Research society-based journals provide rigorous peer review and comprehensive editorial processes and thus, have earned the trust of researchers, professionals, and the public. Funneling research output to non-research society based open access journals may distort the dissemination of scientific research and reduce the quality of scientific communication. Nonprofit research societies use revenues from their publishing operations to finance educational, journalistic, outreach, and other activities and thus, Plan S threatens the financial stability of these research societies. Authors should be allowed to choose the best venue to publish their work. Plan S must be rejected.


Author(s):  
Yuta Kikuchi

AbstractThis study quantitatively estimates the impacts of the partial privatization of Japanese national universities (as implemented in 2004) on research performance outcomes, which are aggregated and disaggregated across research fields. Japanese private universities can be viewed as counterfactuals not targeted by the reform for the same period, which provides within-country variations in this governance/managerial change. Difference-in-differences estimation strategies using private universities as control groups show that the partial privatization of national universities has resulted in a deterioration in the quality and quantity of national universities’ research output, as constructed using publication records from 1999 to 2009. The study then estimates the effects of partial privatization disaggregated by research field and finds that only medical science is negatively affected by the partial privatization. This study is the first to provide a quantitative assessment of whether the partial privatization of Japanese universities has been favorable for research performance using an identification strategy based on a quasi-experiment. It also reveals the heterogeneous impacts across research fields and departments.


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