Open Access Week: Series of reports on OA

Fri Oct 24 17:05:31 EDT 2014

DOA <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_on_arrival> as an acronym for
"Delayed Open Access" does have a certain ring to it, now that I think
about it...

Best,
--
William Gunn | Head of Academic Outreach, Mendeley | @mrgunn
http://www.mendeley.com/profiles/william-gunn | (650) 614-1749

On Thu, Oct 23, 2014 at 7:12 AM, Éric Archambault <
eric.archambault at science-metrix.com> wrote:

> Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe):
> http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html
>
> *Apologies for cross-posting*
>
>
>
> As part of Open Access Week 2014, a series of six reports on open access,
> produced for the European Commission (EC), were posted yesterday on the
> Science-Metrix website:
>
>
>
> http://science-metrix.com/en/publications/reports
>
>
>
> These reports were produced as part of the EC efforts to monitor the
> development of open access (OA) availability of peer-reviewed papers in
> addition to examining policies to promote OA data and scientific
> publications.
>
>
>
> The core report in the series provides definitions for OA scientific
> papers to address some of the shortcomings of existing definitions which
> are far too incomplete to grasp the full spectrum of situations encountered
> while measuring OA availability.
>
>
>
> The following definitions are suggested:
>
>
>
> *A: Access*—can be open (free), restricted or paid; with unrestricted or
> restricted usage rights; quality controlled or not; pre-print
> (pre-referring), post-print (post-referring), or published version (with
> final copy editing and page layout); immediate or delayed; permanent or
> transient.
>
>
>
> *OA: Open Access*—freely available online to all.
>
>
>
> *IOA: Ideal OA*—free; quality controlled (peer-reviewed or editorially
> controlled); with unrestricted usage rights (e.g. CC BY); in final,
> published form; immediate; permanent.
>
>
>
> *RA: Restricted Access*—access restricted to members of a group, club, or
> society.
>
>
>
> *PA: Paid Access*—access restricted by a pay wall; includes subscription
> access, licensed access, and pay-to-view access.
>
>
>
> *Restricted OA*—free but with download restrictions (e.g. registration
> required, restricted to manual download, HTML-only as opposed to
> self-contained format such as PDF) or re-use rights (e.g. CC NC).
>
>
>
> *Green OA*—OA provided before or immediately after publication by author
> self-archiving.
>
>
>
> *Gold OA*—immediate OA provided by a publisher, sometimes with paid for
> publication fee. Note that several Gold journals have right restriction:
> they are Gold ROA. For example, of the 38% of journals listed in the DOAJ
> that use a Creative Common licence, only 53% use the CC-BY licence that
> would allow them to qualify for the IOA definition above (Herb, 2014).
>
> *Gold OA Journal*—journal offering immediate cover-to-cover access.
>
> *Gold OA Article*—immediately accessible paper appearing in a Gold
> journal, or in a PA journal (the latter is also sometimes referred to as
> hybrid open access).
>
>
>
> *ROA: Robin Hood OA or Rogue OA*—Available for free in spite of
> restrictions, usage rights, or copyrights (overriding RA, PA, Restricted
> OA). As the publishers' copyright policies and self-archiving rules are
> compiled by the University of Nottingham in the SHERPA/RoMEO database,
> Rogue OA is synonymous with Robin Hood OA.
>
>
>
> *DOA: Delayed OA*—access after a delay period or embargo.
>
> *Delayed Green OA*—free online access provided by the author after a
> delay (due to author's own delay to make available for free) or embargo
> period (typically imposed by publisher).
>
> *Delayed Gold OA*—free online access provided by the publisher after a
> delay (e.g. change of policy that makes contents available for free) or
> embargo period.
>
> *Delayed Gold OA Journal*—Journal offering cover-to-cover access after an
> embargo period or after a delay.
>
> *Delayed Gold OA Article*—Paper appearing in a Gold journal or in a PA
> journal (the latter is also sometimes referred to as hybrid open access)
> which is available after an embargo period or after a delay.
>
>
>
> *TOA: Transient OA*—free online access during a certain time.
>
> *Transient Green OA*—free online access provided by the author for a
> certain time which then disappears. Note that a substantial part of Green
> OA could be Transient Green OA due to the unstable nature of the internet,
> websites, and institutional repositories, many of which are not updated or
> maintained after a period of time and are therefore susceptible to deletion
> in subsequent institutional website overhauls. There are also integrator
> repositories that can change access rules, for example after being acquired
> by a third party.
>
> *Transient Gold OA*—free but temporary online access provided by the
> publisher, instead of permanent. Sometimes appears as part of promotion.
> Note that some Gold journals and articles sometimes become paid access
> after a certain time, because of revised strategies by a publisher or
> because they are sold to another publisher who instaures paid access.
>
>
>
> Looking forward, we need to understand these various forms of OA
> availability. It was beyond the scope of this project to measure all these
> forms but it is an essential element to address. For example, Robin Hood OA
> has hardly been measured and is somewhat of a taboo subject. Transiency is
> another ill-understood subject that should be addressed by fundamental
> questions such as; What is the percentage of OA papers which are transient
> and why is this occurring?
>
>
>
> Relative to these definitions, the report has shortcomings. In the present
> reports, the following operational definitions were used to perform
> measurement:
>
>
>
> *Green OA*: refers to papers which are self-archived by authors and
> available on institutional repositories as listed in *Open*DOAR and/or in
> ROAR. Listings in *Open*DOAR and ROAR which correspond to known Gold OA
> Journals were set aside. Aggregator sites such as CiteSeerX were not
> considered here, since, even though they access article submissions, they
> do not constitute a repository in the classical sense. Likewise, articles
> in the main PubMed Central sites were not counted as Green as they have
> curtailed usage rights or limited download rights.[3]
> <#1493d5a7cfad330b__ftn1> Because it is commonly difficult to determine
> whether a paper was self-archived before, at the same time or after
> publication and also how long it will be available on the internet, Green
> OA includes Green OA, Delayed Green and Transient Green. Note that some of
> these articles may not respect restrictions placed by journal publishers
> (many of whose rules can be found on SHERPA/ROMEO)[4]
> <#1493d5a7cfad330b__ftn2> and therefore contain a certain number of Robin
> Hood OA papers. Finally, only articles which could be downloaded without
> user registrations were considered.
>
>
>
> *Gold Journals OA*: refers to papers appearing in journals listed in the
> Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)[5] <#1493d5a7cfad330b__ftn3> and
> on the PubMed Central list of journals.[6] <#1493d5a7cfad330b__ftn4> When
> a paper is published during the first year that a journal appears in the
> DOAJ, it is not counted. This is a conservative decision due to the fact
> that one cannot determine whether a journal started publishing Gold
> articles early or late during the year. For PubMed Central, only open
> access journals with full participation and immediate access were
> considered to be Gold, hence all journals with an embargo and in the 'NIH
> Portfolio' were not considered. Thus, this category covers articles
> appearing in Gold journals and excludes delayed Gold as well as piecemeal
> Gold (Gold articles in paid access journals, also called hybrid OA).
>
>
>
> *Other OA*: refers to pretty much everything that could be found on the
> web by a determined researcher and downloaded for free and which was not
> part of the Green and Gold operational definitions above. This comprises
> articles appearing in journals with an embargo period (Delayed Gold OA);
> articles appearing on authors' webpages and elsewhere (both Green OA and
> Rogue OA); articles appearing on aggregator sites such as ResearchGate and
> CiteSeerX in addition to PubMed Central. The category comprises both
> transiently and permanently accessible items as there are no reliable ways
> to ascertain at measurement time whether an item will be permanently
> accessible or not.
>
>
>
> *Total OA*: The mutually exclusive sum of Green OA, Gold Journal OA, and
> Other OA.
>
>
>
> These definitions, though they made sense from an operational
> point-of-view, are inadequate for the future. They were used in response to
> comments received on last year’s series of reports. They were a stopgap
> measure and reflected what could be done on the project’s budget and with
> the tools available. More detailed work is required, preferably on a large
> scale such as was done in this study (sample larger than 1 million randomly
> selected articles).
>
>
>
> An important aspect of the study which we hope will be followed by other
> metrology undertakings on OA availability is the use of: 1) large scale
> measurement to reduce statistical error; 2) use of calibration sample to
> determine adjustment by counting precisely recall and precision of the
> large scale measurement apparatus; 3) applying the calibration to the
> measured quantities. With hindsight, the application of the second part of
> the technique is a weak point of the study as the sample size was too small
> (500) and added an error of ± 4.5 percentage points. The manual calibration
> should be closer to 10,000 randomly selected papers to establish a gold
> standard to reduce additional error to about 1 percentage point (simplified
> discussion here, please see report D1.8 for a more elaborate discussion).
>
>
>
> Discussion of the source of data’s characteristics is also essential. We
> need to have a more in-depth understanding of OA availability per country.
> I strongly suspect that countries that are not covered by WoS and Scopus
> are more likely to have a greater propensity to diffuse knowledge openly
> (and more so for the former, which partly explains why measuring OA with
> WoS provides lower scores). Combining WoS with no calibration for recall
> and precision can lead to a very serious underestimation of OA availability
> (missing more than 40% of the actual count of all peer-reviewed papers). It
> is likely that this study also underestimates OA availability because of
> the inadequate non-English language scientific literature in Scopus.
>
>
>
> Another important contribution of the report is the examination of the
> scientific impact of OA vs. non-OA literature with three scores: 1)
> normalised impact of all literature (=1.0); 2) normalised impact of OA
> literature; 3) normalised impact of non-OA literature. Using a one-million
> article sample shows the deleterious effect, on average, of non-espousing
> an OA diffusion strategy. Data are also presented on broad fields of
> knowledge and show that green OA is king for impact yet even the younger
> (on average) gold journals are showing greater impact than the
> more-established (on average) subscription-based journals in several
> fields. Seriously designed studies are required to control for embargo to
> understand how DOA papers are disadvantaged in terms of scientific impact
> relative to immediate OA.
>
>
>
> These results are presented at length in the report which can be
> downloaded from here:
>
>
>
>
> http://science-metrix.com/en/publications/reports#/en/publications/reports/proportion-of-open-access-papers-published-in-peer-reviewed-journals-at-the
>
>
>
> A review of OA policies for scientific publication can be found here:
>
>
>
>
> http://science-metrix.com/en/publications/reports#/en/publications/reports/state-of-art-analysis-of-oa-strategies-to-peer-review-publications
>
>
>
> A review of OA policies for scientific data can be found here:
>
>
>
>
> http://science-metrix.com/en/publications/reports#/en/publications/reports/state-of-art-analysis-of-oa-strategies-to-scientific-data
>
>
>
> A comparative analysis of OA policies for scientific publications and data
> can be found here:
>
>
>
>
> http://science-metrix.com/en/publications/reports#/en/publications/reports/comparative-analysis-of-the-strengths-and-weaknesses-of-existing-open-access
>
>
>
> A synthesis report on OA availability and policies can be found here:
>
>
>
>
> http://science-metrix.com/en/publications/reports#/en/publications/reports/evolution-of-open-access-policies-and-availability-1996-2013-0
>
>
>
> Finally, the short version of this synthesis can be found here:
>
>
>
>
> http://science-metrix.com/en/publications/reports#/en/publications/reports/summary-report-evolution-of-open-access-policies-and-availability-1996-2013
>
>
>
> Have a great Open Access Week and we hope you will appreciate these
> weekend readings.
>
>
>
> Yours sincerely
>
>
>
> Eric Archambault, Ph.D.
>
> President and CEO | Président-directeur général
>
> Science-Metrix
>
> Brussels | Montréal | Washington
>
> 1335, Mont-Royal E
>
> Montréal, QC  H2J 1Y6
>
> Canada
>
>
>
> T. 1.514.495.6505 x.111
>
> F. 1.514.495.6523
>
> E-mail: eric.archambault at science-metrix.com
>
> Web:    www.science-metrix.com
>
>
>
>
>  ------------------------------
>
> ------------------------------
>
> [3] <#1493d5a7cfad330b__ftnref1> The PubMed Central site mentions 'You
> may NOT use any kind of automated process to download articles in bulk from
> the main PMC site. PMC will block the access of any user who is found to be
> violating this policy'. See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/faq/#q12
> .
>
> [4] <#1493d5a7cfad330b__ftnref2> http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/.
>
> [5] <#1493d5a7cfad330b__ftnref3> https://doaj.org/about.
>
> [6] <#1493d5a7cfad330b__ftnref4> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/journals/
> .
>
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