Wednesday 16 November 2011

Measuring uptake of Open Access at QM

I am currently trying to put together all the relevant bits of data, and there are plenty, that will allow me to calculate what proportion of Queen Mary publications are Open Access (OA).  So far, the process has been time-consuming and not a lot of fun, but I feel like I am starting to make some progress.  Please someone out there doing a similar job to me, is there a better way?

The plan:
  • Extract a report from PubLists, the publications management system at QM - this gives me a recently updated and reasonably complete set of data (thank you REF dry-run!)
  • Identify OA publishers where all journals are OA and flag all the records in my spreadsheet
  • Identify OA journals by publishers whose other titles are subscription - judicious use of DOAJ very important here - flag more records
  • Filter my spreadsheet to show only those records where I haven't identified them as OA and then start working through the remaining records to find out if they are OA papers in a hybrid journal
  • Calculate the number of paid OA/OA published papers in 2010
  • Check through the remaining records for self-archived copies in QMRO
  • Start calculating how many of the 1700 records are available OA somewhere
I am still identifying OA journals at the moment and have spent 2 days working on it so far.  I was hopnig to have it finished by the end of the week, but this seems to be less and less likely.  The sheer size of the task is quite daunting, and I am only concentrating on 2010 for now, as the most recent full calendar year, but I'd like to be able to do this in a more systematic and timely way...

Initial thoughts about how to make this simpler:
  1. Please, please, please could I have an extract from DOAJ that would make the process of identifying OA journals much easier
  2. Please, please, please hybrid journal publishers, provide me with a report of my OA content, download and other usage statistics would be lovely, but at the very least I need to know what there is!

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