The influence of funding on the Open Access citation advantage

Authors : Pablo Dorta-González, María Isabel Dorta-González

Some of the citation advantage in open access is likely due to more access allows more people to read and hence cite articles they otherwise would not. However, causation is difficult to establish and there are many possible bias. Several factors can affect the observed differences in citation rates.

Funder mandates can be one of them. Funders are likely to have OA requirement, and well-funded studies are more likely to receive more citations than poorly funded studies. In this paper this hypothesis is tested. Thus, we studied the effect of funding on the publication modality and the citations received in more than 128 thousand research articles, of which 31% were funded.

These research articles come from 40 randomly selected subject categories in the year 2016, and the citations received from the period 2016-2020 in the Scopus database. We found open articles published in hybrid journals were considerably more cited than those in open access journals.

Thus, articles under the hybrid gold modality are cite on average twice as those in the gold modality. This is the case regardless of funding, so this evidence is strong. Moreover, within the same publication modality, we found that funded articles generally obtain 50% more citations than unfunded ones.

The most cited modality is the hybrid gold and the least cited is the gold, well below even the paywalled. Furthermore, the use of open access repositories considerably increases the citations received, especially for those articles without funding. Thus, the articles in open access repositories (green) are 50% more cited than the paywalled ones.

This evidence is remarkable and does not depend on funding. Excluding the gold modality, there is a citation advantage in more than 75% of the cases and it is considerably greater among unfunded articles. This result is strong both across fields and over time

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.02082v1

Sharing published short academic works in institutional repositories after six months : The implementation of the article 25fa (Taverne Amendment) in the Dutch Copyright Act

Authors : Jeroen Sondervan, Arjan Schalken, Saskia Woutersen-Windhouwer

The ambition of the Netherlands, laid down in the National Plan Open Science, is to achieve 100% open access for academic publications. The ambition was to be achieved by 2020. However, it is to be expected that for the year 2020 between 70% and 75% of the articles will be open access.

Until recently, the focus of the Netherlands has been on the gold route – open access via journals and publishers’ platforms. This is likely to be costly and it is also impossible to cover all articles and other publication types this way.

Since 2015, Dutch Copyright Act has offered an alternative with the implementation of Article 25fa (also known as the ‘Taverne Amendment’), facilitating the green route, i.e. open access via (trusted) repositories.

This amendment allows researchers to share short scientific works (e.g. articles and book chapters in edited collections), regardless of any restrictive guidelines from publishers. From February 2019 until August 2019 all Dutch universities participated in the pilot ‘You Share, we Take Care!’ to test how this copyright amendment could be interpreted and implemented by institutions as a policy instrument to enhance green open access and “self-archiving”.

In 2020 steps were taken to scale up further implementation of the amendment. This article describes the outcomes of this pilot and shares best practices on implementation and awareness activities in the period following the pilot until early 2021, in which libraries have played an instrumental role in building trust and working on effective implementations on an institutional level.

It concludes with some possible next steps for alignment, for example on a European level.

URL : Sharing published short academic works in institutional repositories after six months : The implementation of the article 25fa (Taverne Amendment) in the Dutch Copyright Act

DOI : https://doi.org/10.53377/lq.10915

Open Access Models, Pirate Libraries and Advocacy Repertoires: Policy Options for Academics to Construct and Govern Knowledge Commons

Author : Melanie Dulong de Rosnay

In this article, I propose exploring open access publishing through the lenses of Knowledge Commons. Instead of focusing on users’ rights to access and reuse the output under open copyright licensing conditions, I study the governance of the academic publishing ecosystem, and its political economy, technical and labour infrastructure. Based on selected examples, I discuss how they comply with the concept of the commons.

I use analytical frameworks from the Ostromian literature of the governance of Knowledge Commons to provide insights on the various steps of academic publishing work as a process. I then analyse a scope of open access publishing projects, including gold, green, diamond, platinum and pirate libraries. Finally, I draw from practices a repertoire of advocacy actions and I make recommendations for academics to develop policies supporting Academic Commons.

URL : Open Access Models, Pirate Libraries and Advocacy Repertoires: Policy Options for Academics to Construct and Govern Knowledge Commons

DOI : https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.913

Open access analytics with open access repository data: A Multi-level perspective

Author : Ibraheem Mohammed Sultan Al Sadi

Within nearly two decades after the open access movement emerged, its community has drawn attention to understanding its development, coverage, obstacles and motivations. To do so, they depend on data-centric analytics of open access publishing activities, using Web information space as their data sources for these analytical activities.

Open access repositories are one such data source that nurtures open access publishing activities and are a valuable source for analytics. Therefore, the open access community utilises open access repository infrastructure to develop and operate analytics, harnessing the widely adopted Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) interoperability layer to develop value-added services with an analytics agenda.

However,this layer presents its limitations and challenges regarding the support of analytical value-added services. To address these practices, this research has taken the step to consolidate these practices into the ‘open access analytics’ notion of drawing attention to its significance and bridge it with data analytics literature.

As part of this, an explanatory case study demonstrate show the OAI-PMH service provider approach supports open access analytics and also presents its limitations using Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) analytics as a case study.

The case study reflects the limitation of open access registries to enable a single point of discovery due to the quality of their records and complexity of open access repositories taxonomy, the complexity of operationalising the unit of analysis in particular analytics due to the limitations in the OAI-PMH metadata schemes, the complex and resource-intensive harvesting process due to the large volume of data and the low quality of OAI-PMH standards adoptions and the issue of service provider suitability due to a single point of failure.

Also, this doctoral thesis proposes the use of Open Access Analytics using Open Access Repository Data with a Social Machine (OAA-OARD-SM) as a conceptual frame work to deliver open access analytics by using the open access repository infrastructure in acollaborative manner with social machines.

Furthermore, it takes advantage of the web observatory infrastructure as a form of web-based mediated technology to coordinate the open access analytics process. The conceptual framework re-frames the open access analytics process into four layers: the open access repository layer, the open access registry layer, the data analytics layer and open access analytics layer.

It also conceptualises analytics practices carried out within individual repository boundaries as core practices for the realisation of open access analytics and examines how the repository management team can participate in the open access analytics process.

To understand this, expert interviews were carried out to investigate and understand the analytics practices within the repository boundaries and the repository management teams’ interactions with analytics applications that are fed by the open access repository or used by repository management to operate open access analytics.

The interviews provide insight into the variations in the types of analytic practices and highlight the active role played by the repository management team in these practices. Thus, it provides an understanding of the analytics practices within open access repositories by classifying them into two main categories: the distributed analytical applications and locally operated analytics.

The distributed analytics application includes cross repository OAI-based analytics, cross-repository usage data aggregators, solo-repository content-centric analytics and solo-repository centric analytics.

On the other hand, the locally operated analytics take forms of Current Research Information System (CRIS),repository embedded functionalities and in-house developed analytics. It also classifies the repository management interactions with analytics into four roles: data analyst, administrative, data and system management, and system development and support.

Lastly, it raises concerns associated with the application of analytics on open access repositories, including data-related, cost-related and analytical concerns.

URL : http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/447464

How to achieve short-term green open access and long-term radical reform of scholarly communication. The BitViews Project as a test case

Author : Manfredi La Manna

The Open Access movement has reached adulthood, but not maturity: fewer than one-third of newly-published peer-reviewed articles are available open access (OA) and progress widening OA has stalled.

Scores of uncoordinated initiatives try to achieve universal OA, but academic journal publishing is still dominated by a handful of powerful commercial publishers. Individual authors show little interest in OA and indeed have to be mandated (see the UK REF or Plan S) to release their research on OA.

The BitViews Project is a low-cost, no-risk, high-return initiative to turn all academic journals «green» through a combination of blockchain technology, provision of appropriate incentives to authors, and a new crowdfunding mechanism.

The project is predicated on the active participation of individual libraries taking direct action. The paper will provide an interim report on the progress of the project and an account of how libraries and their various associations (both in the global South and in the global North) have reacted to the project.

The concluding section of the paper sketches a possible direction for academic journal publishing in the near future. Huge savings and increased efficiency can flow to the academy from finally dissolving its current one-sided contract with publishers and from reclaiming control of the peer-review process.

Practical and incentive-based suggestions are proposed for the transition from publisher-owned to academy-owned peer review.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02544856

On the Potential of Preprints in Geochemistry: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Authors : Olivier Pourret, Dasapta Erwin Irawan, Jonathan P. Tennant

In recent years, the pace of the dissemination of scientific information has increased. In this context, the possibility and value of sharing open access (OA) online manuscripts in their preprint form seem to be growing in many scientific fields. More and more platforms are especially dedicated to free preprint publishing.

They are published, non-peer-reviewed scholarly papers that typically precede publication in a peer-reviewed journal. They have been a part of science since at least the 1960s.

In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web to help researchers share knowledge easily. A few months later, in August 1991, as a centralized web-based network, arXiv was created. arXiv is arguably the most influential preprint platform and has supported the fields of physics, mathematics and computer science for over 30 years.

Since, preprint platforms have become popular in many disciplines (e.g., bioRxiv for biological sciences) due to the increasing drive towards OA publishing, and can be publisher- or community-driven, profit or not for profit, and based on proprietary or free and open source software. A range of discipline-specific or cross-domain platforms now exist, with exponential growth these last five years.

While preprints as a whole still represent only a small proportion of scholarly publishing, a strong community of early adopters is already beginning to experiment with such value-enhancing tools in many more disciplines than before.

The two main options for geochemists are EarthArXiv and ESSOAr. A “one size fits all” model for preprints would never work across the entire scientific community. The geochemistry community needs to develop and sustain their own model.

URL : On the Potential of Preprints in Geochemistry: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/su12083360

Toward Easy Deposit: Lowering the Barriers of Green Open Access with Data Integration and Automation

Author : Hui Zhang

This article describes the design and development of an interoperable application that supports green open access with long-term sustainability and improved user experience of article deposit.

The lack of library resources and the unfriendly repository user interface are two significant barriers that hinder green open access.

Tasked to implement the open access mandate, librarians at an American research university developed a comprehensive system called Easy Deposit 2 to automate the support workflow of green open access.

Easy Deposit 2 is a web application that is able to harvest new publications, to source manuscripts on behalf of the library, and to facilitate self-archiving to a university’s institutional repository.

The article deposit rate increased from 7.40% to 25.60% with the launch of Easy Deposit 2. The results show that a computer system can implement routine tasks to support green open access with success.

Recent developments in digital repository provide new opportunities for innovation, such as Easy Deposit 2, in supporting open access.

Academic librarians are vital in promoting “openness” in scholarly communication, such as transparency and diversity in the sharing of publication data.

URL : Toward Easy Deposit: Lowering the Barriers of Green Open Access with Data Integration and Automation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications8020028