Anatomy of Green Open Access

Open Access (OA) is the free unrestricted access to electronic versions of scholarly publications. For peer reviewed journal articles there are two main routes to OA, publishing in OA journals (gold OA) or archiving of article copies or manuscripts at other web locations (green OA). This study focuses on summarizing and extending upon current knowledge about green OA. A synthesis of previous studies indicates that the green OA coverage of all published journal articles is approximately 12 %, with substantial disciplinary variation. Typically, green OA copies become available with considerable time delays, partly caused by publisher imposed embargo periods, and partly by author tendencies to archive manuscripts only periodically. Although green OA copies should ideally be archived in proper repositories, a large share is stored on home pages and similar locations, with no assurance of long-term preservation. Often such locations contain exact copies of published articles, which may infringe on the publisher’s exclusive rights. The technical foundation for green OA uploading is becoming increasingly solid, which is largely due to the rapid increase in the number of institutional repositories. The number of articles within the scope of OA mandates, which strongly influence the self- archival rate of articles, is nevertheless still low.peerReviewe

Open Access to research articles published in Iceland in 2013

To access publisher's full text version of this article, please click on the hyperlink in Additional Links field or click on the hyperlink at the top of the page marked Files. This article is open access

Green on What Side of the Fence? Librarian Perceptions of Accepted Author Manuscripts

INTRODUCTION There is a growing body of accepted author manuscripts (AAMs) in national, professional, and institutional repositories. This study seeks to explore librarian attitudes about AAMs and in what contexts they should be recommended. Particular attention is paid to differences between the attitudes of librarians whose primary job responsibilities are within the field of scholarly communications as opposed to the rest of the profession. METHODS An Internet survey was sent to nine different professional listservs, asking for voluntary anonymous participation. RESULTS This study finds that AAMs are considered an acceptable source by many librarians, with scholarly communications librarians more willing to recommend AAMs in higher-stakes contexts such as health care and dissertation research. DISCUSSION Librarian AAM attitudes are discussed, with suggestions for future research and implications for librarians

Estimating Open Access Mandate Effectiveness: The MELIBEA Score

MELIBEA is a Spanish database that uses a composite formula with eight weighted conditions to estimate the effectiveness of Open Access mandates (registered in ROARMAP). We analyzed 68 mandated institutions for publication years 2011-2013 to determine how well the MELIBEA score and its individual conditions predict what percentage of published articles indexed by Web of Knowledge is deposited in each institution's OA repository, and when. We found a small but significant positive correlation (0.18) between MELIBEA score and deposit percentage. We also found that for three of the eight MELIBEA conditions (deposit timing, internal use, and opt-outs), one value of each was strongly associated with deposit percentage or deposit latency (immediate deposit required, deposit required for performance evaluation, unconditional opt-out allowed for the OA requirement but no opt-out for deposit requirement). When we updated the initial values and weights of the MELIBEA formula for mandate effectiveness to reflect the empirical association we had found, the score's predictive power doubled (.36). There are not yet enough OA mandates to test further mandate conditions that might contribute to mandate effectiveness, but these findings already suggest that it would be useful for future mandates to adopt these three conditions so as to maximize their effectiveness, and thereby the growth of OA.Comment: 27 pages, 13 figures, 3 tables, 40 references, 7761 word

The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles

Despite growing interest in Open Access (OA) to scholarly literature, there is an unmet need for large-scale, up-to-date, and reproducible studies assessing the prevalence and characteristics of OA. We address this need using oaDOI, an open online service that determines OA status for 67 million articles. We use three samples, each of 100,000 articles, to investigateOAin three populations: (1) all journal articles assigned a Crossref DOI, (2) recent journal articles indexed in Web of Science, and (3) articles viewed by users of Unpaywall, an open-source browser extension that lets users find OA articles using oaDOI. We estimate that at least 28% of the scholarly literature is OA (19M in total) and that this proportion is growing, driven particularly by growth in Gold and Hybrid. The most recent year analyzed (2015) also has the highest percentage of OA (45%). Because of this growth, and the fact that readers disproportionately access newer articles, we find that Unpaywall users encounter OA quite frequently: 47% of articles they view are OA. Notably, the most common mechanism for OA is not Gold, Green, or Hybrid OA, but rather an under-discussed category we dub Bronze: articles made freeto- read on the publisher website, without an explicit Open license. We also examine the citation impact of OA articles, corroborating the so-called open-access citation advantage: accounting for age and discipline, OA articles receive 18% more citations than average, an effect driven primarily by Green and Hybrid OA.Weencourage further research using the free oaDOI service, as a way to inform OA policy and practice

Working Against Ourselves, Working Together

In the evolving landscape of scholarly communication, librarians not only spend countless hours educating researchers about copyright, subscription licensing, classroom use, author’s agreements, and open access, but they also pay enormous subscription fees to publishers. This is potentially the reality of a system in flux, the fact of being in the middle of a change: we work for reform and enforce the current system in the same breath. Librarians tend to be risk averse, and rightly so, but this caution should not mean that librarians are pacifiers instead of change agents, that we educate while accepting publisher’s models without question or action

Delays in Availability of Faculty Journal Articles: Local Effects of Open Access Policies.

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Open Acess and the future of research and scientific communication

O Acesso Aberto aos resultados da investigação académica e científica conheceu um notável progresso na última década, desde que o conceito de open access foi definido e divulgado através da Declaração de Budapeste em 2002. Hoje parece cada vez mais provável que o acesso aberto será a forma predominante na comunicação científica no horizonte de uma década. Mas estamos ainda a meio do período de transição e existe muita incerteza quanto ao caminho que irá ser trilhado nos próximos anos. A transição poderá ser comandada pelos interesses da investigação (com os investigadores e as organizações de investigação, como as universidades, a assumir maior responsabilidade e protagonismo na disseminação e publicação dos seus próprios resultados), ou poderá ser realizada sob a direção da indústria da publicação científica. Disso dependerá, por um lado, a configuração final do sistema de comunicação científica em acesso aberto e, por outro, o papel que poderá estar reservado às bibliotecas universitárias nesse sistema. À luz da experiência dos últimos dez anos, e especialmente dos desenvolvimentos mais recentes nas políticas de acesso aberto dos organismos financiadores de ciência, nesta comunicação procuramos refletir sobre as ameaças e oportunidades, em particular para as bibliotecas universitárias, da transição para o acesso aberto.Open access to the results of academic and scientific research has made a remarkable progress since the concept was defined and published in the 2002 Budapest Declaration. Nowadays it seems increasingly likely that open access will be the prevailing form on scientific communication within a decade. However, we are still in a transitional phase and a great deal of uncertainty surrounds the path that will be followed in the coming years. The transition may be led by research interests (with researchers and research organisations, together with universities, assuming greater responsibility and a leading role in the dissemination and publication of their own results), or directed by the scientific publishing industry. This will impact, on the one hand, on the final configuration of the open access communication system and, on the other hand, on the role that may be reserved for university libraries within this system. In the light of the experiences of the past ten years, particularly more recent developments in the open access policies from funding bodies, the aim of this paper is to reflect on the threats and opportunities involved in the transition to open access, in particular for university libraries

Sozialwissenschaften

This text was published as a book chapter in the publication "Praxishandbuch Open Access" ("Open Access Handbook") edited by Konstanze Söllner and Bernhard Mittermaier. It reflects the current state of Open Access to text publications, data and software in the Social Sciences