937,874 research outputs found

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

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    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

    Academic sell-out: how an obsession with metrics and rankings is damaging academia

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    Increasingly, academics have to demonstrate that their research has academic impact. Universities normally use journal rankings and journal impact factors to assess the research impact of individual academics. More recently, citation counts for individual articles and the h-index have also been used to measure the academic impact of academics. There are, however, several serious problems with relying on journal rankings, journal impact factors and citation counts. For example, articles without any impact may be published in highly ranked journals or journals with high impact factor, whereas articles with high impact could be published in lower ranked journals or journals with low impact factor. Citation counts can also be easily gamed and manipulated, and the h-index disadvantages early career academics. This paper discusses these and several other problems and suggests alternatives such as post-publication peer review and open-access journals

    Developing a model for e-prints and open access journal content in UK further and higher education

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    In this article we describe a delivery, management and access model for eprints and open access journal content for UK further and higher education commissioned by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). The target content is (i) e-prints � digital copies of academic research articles published in subscription-based journals that are made available online to permit increased access; and (ii) articles published in open access journals. The proposed service would provide immediate and maximal access to scholarly research, supplementing the more limited access provided by subscription-based journals, in turn maximizing the impact of research. This record was migrated from the OpenDepot repository service in June, 2017 before shutting down

    The Impact of Open Access Contributions: Developed and Developing World Perspectives

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    The study explores the research impact of ‘Open Access research articles’ across the globe with a view to test the hypothesis that “OA research contributions emanating from developing countries receive equal citations (subsequently resultant research impact) as those from the developed world”. The study covers 5639 research articles from 50 Open Access DOAJ based Medical Sciences journals covering the period from 2005 to 2006. The research impact of OA research publications measured by the citation counts varies from journal to journal and from country to country. Statistically significant difference is noted between the research impact of the developed and the developing world for OA research articles. The research articles from the developed countries receive higher number of citations (subsequently resultant research impact) compared to those of the developing world. The study may help and pave way for framing policies and strategies to increase the impact of research in the developing world

    The Institutional Repository route to Open Access: implications for its evolution

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    Open access to peer reviewed journal articles is one of the key messages of the current global movement that is changing the paradigm of scholarly communication. Creating open access journals is one such route and creating institutional repositories containing author generated electronic text is another complementary alternative. In the UK, the FAIR (Focus on Access to Institutional Resources) programme of research is based on the vision of open access. Experiments in setting up an institutional repository for academic research output at the University of Southampton have emphasized that the institutional repository agenda is broader and that academic needs may dictate a more expanded database model than the pioneering discipline based e-Prints archive known as ‘arXiv’. The institution is represented by a broad range of publication types including, but not exclusively, peer reviewed journal articles and the different disciplines have evolved different recording practices. Full text deposits may provide the opportunity for added value elements – e.g. enhanced diagrams, additional data or presentations – if the database provides the capability. The repository may provide the building blocks for effective management of collaborative e-research. Academic institutions that impose research reporting in an institutional repository require full recording of publications including those where obtaining full text is difficult or inappropriate. A practical route is, therefore, to develop an institutional repository which is ’hybrid’ – containing both records and full text where achievable. In this scenario, the technical and management issues eg authentication and quality assurance of the metadata generation may become more complex. However, the full text element can grow as the practice becomes more natural within the recording process and as copyright restrictions ease. In the UK, several factors including the Research Assessment Exercise and citation impact measures based on increasing open access could also help encourage this change. The goal of providing open access to peer reviewed research items may, therefore, come about by a more circuitous but, in the end, more effective route. The ‘hybrid’ library will have evolved to the digital library of the ideal

    Impact of open access on citation of scholarly publications in the field of civil engineering

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    The development of science is accompanied by growth of scholarly publications, primarily in the form of articles in peer-reviewed journals. Scientific work is often evaluated through the number of scientific publications in international journals and their citations. This article discusses the impact of open access (OA) on the number of citations for an institution from the field of civil engineering. We analyzed articles, published in 2007 in 14 international journals with impact factor, which are included in the Journal Citation Reports subject category “Civil Engineering”. The influence of open access on the number of citations was analyzed. The aim of our research was to determine if open access articles from the field of civil engineering receive more citations than non-open access articles. Based on the value of impact factor and ranking in quartiles, we also looked at the influence of the rank of journals on the number of citations, separately for OA and Non OA articles, in databases Web of Science (WOS), Scopus and Google Scholar. For 2,026 studied articles we found out that 22 % of them were published as OA articles. They received 29 % of all citations in the observed period. We can conclude by the significance level 5 % or less that in the databases WOS and Scopus the articles from top ranked journals (first quartile) achieved more citations than Non OA articles. This argument can be confirmed for some other journals from second quartile as well, while for the journals ranked into the third quartile it can’t be confirmed. This could be confirmed only partly for journals from the second quartile, and would not be confirmed for journals ranked into the third quartile. This shows that open access is not a sufficient condition for citation, but increases the number of citations for articles published in journals with high impact

    Open Access for All: Uniting a University Community

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    Open Access is not just the distribution of journal articles and scholarly information that’s free of barriers. It’s an issue of income inequality, paywalls, supplemental course material, and research impact beyond the university. Open Access has not been thoroughly discussed throughout all members of the university. This project takes a look at the conversations going on at the university levels through the perspectives of students, teaching faculty, and library faculty. Through this research, it became apparent that the value of Open Access advocacy is multifaceted, interdisciplinary and benefits from advocacy across all levels of the university. This essay is broken up into two sections. The first is a collection of talking points, used for advocacy across audiences, while the second is an analysis of those points using scholarly articles. These advocacy points are to be used to facilitate conversation throughout members of the university to promote Open Access policy

    The Relation between Self-Citation and Impact Factor in Medical Science Open Access Journals in ISI & DOAJ Databases

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    Citation is one of the important elements in scientific literature which has a significant role in information production and generation. Self-citation is a part of citation behavior. Relying on their articles, journals can change the number of citations and consequently the level of journal impact factor. This research aims at investigating the relation between self-citation and impact factor in the open access journals indexed in ISI and DOAJ in medical science in 2007-08. In this research, indexes such as the relation between self-citation of journal and impact factor and the effect of self-citation rate of the journal in open access performance are investigated. Research method is an analytical method conducted by using citation analysis technique. SPSS statistical software was used to examine and analyze the data and its inferential analysis methods such as Pierson Factor were used as well. Statistical society includes 168 journals. The results showed a self-citation rate of 28% for the journal. The findings indicate that there is a significant relation between self-citation and impact factor. After omitting self-citation, the level of self-citation in the performance of journals showed that 60% of the titles in the medical science experienced ranking increase, 27% experienced ranking decrease and 13% remained unchanged. Torabian R, Heidari A, Shahrifar M, Khodadi E, Esmaeile Vardanjani SA. The Relation between Self-Citation and Impact Factor in Medical Science Open Access Journals in ISI & DOAJ Databases. Life Sci J 2012;9(4):2206-2209] (ISSN: 1097-8135). http://www.lifesciencesite.com. 32
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