Open Access Monitor Reloaded

Der von der Zentralbibliothek des Forschungszentrums Jülich betriebene Open Access Monitor Deutschland (OAM; gefördert vom BMBF, FKZ16OAMO001) steht seit 2019 zur frei zugänglichen Datenanalyse zur Verfügung. Seit August 2021 präsentiert sich der OAM mit einem neu designten Frontend der Website. Das alte Frontend basierte auf Vue (Progressive JavaScript Framework), Vuetify und Echarts, wohingegen das neue Frontend auf ASP.NET, Blazor, MudBlazor sowie Plotly aufbaut. Die Filterfunktionen sind als Steuerungstool für Datenanalysen vom Seitenrand in den Mittelpunkt der Anwendung gerückt. Die bisherige Darstellung der Auswertungen in Aggregationsstufen wurde durch selbst wählbare Gruppierungsoptionen abgelöst. Die Darstellung der OA-Farben ist weiter ausdifferenziert und eine Auswahl des genauen Publikationsdatums ist möglich. Neu sind die englischsprachige Oberfläche sowie eine umfangreichere Dokumentation incl. FAQ

Open Access Monitor Germany: Best Practice in Providing Metrics for Analysis and Decision-Making

In light of the ongoing transformation of scholarly publishing toward open access, libraries need data-based tools that enable them to make decisions that respond to the challenges posed by this shift. Tasks such as collection development, applications for funding, or consulting researchers on publication venues require a solid base of data, which is not always easily available to librarians. Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the Open Access Monitor Germany (OAM) aims to provide libraries, funders, and researchers with a freely available tool that presents data on publications and citations for analysis. The OAM records the publication output of German academic institutions in scientific journals. Through analyses of subscription fees and (open access) publication fees, it helps to monitor and support the transition of the publishing system toward an open access system. To this end, data from existing sources are collated within an expanded database, made available to users in an open interface, and disseminated by means of scientific publications. The OAM draws on sources such as Unpaywall, Dimensions, Web of Science, Scopus, and OpenAPC. Unpaywall is used as a central data source for publication metadata including open access availability; this data is then matched with Crossref data for journal-level metadata and finally with Dimensions, Web of Science and Scopus data for affiliations and citation data. The connection to OpenAPC provides data on publication costs for each participating institution. The interface https://open-access-monitor.de/publications presents users with a wide range of filters that can be used to customize the underlying data in line with specific needs. Users can switch between Dimensions, Web of Science and Scopus affiliations and make use of different analysis types including publication analyses, cost analyses, and citation analyses. Results are presented as tables as well as charts and can be downloaded for further use. In the future, additional data sources including subscriptions to scientific journals and subscription payments will be integrated to allow the shift in payment flows in the changing publication market to be observed. The integration of data from the electronic resource management system LAS:eR has already been initiated and will soon be completed. Moreover, interfaces will be created to connect the Alma and FOLIO systems. Together with data on publication costs, this will provide participating institutions with easily accessible overview of their total costs, thus enabling them to calculate an integrated budget for subscriptions and publications. Institutions using the OAM are advised with regard to analyzing data and technically integrating the OAM into their own applications. Small and medium-sized publishers from German-speaking countries are supported in the negotiation of transformation contracts by means of data from the OAM. The OAM project team also conducts studies that address a number of scientific issues, for example the impact of open access on scientific networks and the role of open access in the field of monographs. The relationship between open access and the citation rates of published works is another possible research area that can be addressed with the help of the OAM

Open Access bei Monographien: Machbarkeitsstudie für den Open Access Monitor

Monographien sind in vielen Wissenschaftsbereichen von zentraler Bedeutung, jedoch in der Open-Access-Transformation derzeit noch weniger repräsentiert. Die meisten Bestrebungen für das Publizieren im Open Access wurden bisher im Bereich der Zeitschriften unternommen. Diese Dokumentart wird in Publikationsdatenbanken in großem Umfang erfasst. Darauf aufbauend kann der Open Access Monitor den Transformationsprozess mit einer soliden Datenbasis für Zeitschriftenartikel unterstützen. Die Ergänzung von Monographien wäre wünschenswert, jedoch bedarf es dafür einer geeigneten Datenquelle. Ob eine solche Einbindung möglich ist und was eine geeignete Datenquelle wäre, soll in dieser Studie untersucht werden

Big Scholarly Data im Open Access Monitor: ein Werkstattbericht

In the light of the Open Access transformation, the analysis of large amounts of data is increasingly important for libraries, whereas the number of scholarly publications is constantly growing. Large amounts of data must first be made usable before any substantiated analysis can be made, e.g. regarding institution-related publication outputs. This is where the Open Access Monitor (OAM) comes in, which acts as an interface for merging data from various source systems such as Unpaywall, Dimensions, Web of Science and Scopus. For this purpose, the OAM is structurally divided into three parts: the backend hosts the data, which can be queried via the API, and is presented and visualized in the frontend. All data, coming from various source systems, must be homogenized in order to realize complete data sets without creating duplicates. Journal titles or institution names have to be standardized to allow assigning the original entries from the source systems to the corresponding data records in the OAM. In the case of institution names, these are enriched with persistent identifiers. Given the way the data is organized in some of the source databases, the institution names cannot be mapped directly to organization identifiers (ROR-IDs) in some cases. Therefore, the raw forms of the author’s affiliation information are used in the mapping process. Affiliation mapping is an extensive and complex task, since the data provided are often ambiguous and at the same time a clear distinction of institutions, especially in the case of university hospitals, requires intellectual processing. The highly complex process of generating a uniform data set from a multitude of data sources will be demonstrated, with a special focus on the normalization processes as well as the assignment of Open Access categories. Metadata quality remains a constant challenge, as does the issue of availability and sustainability of the connected source systems. The use and integration of open data sources is generally desirable – it would be in line with the OAM’s goal of unrestricted (re-) usability of the OAM data. The pros and cons of using non-commercial databases are discussed using OpenAlex as an example