[GOAL] Report on measuring open access - of broad interest

[Éric Archambault]

Dear colleagues,

You may have seen our recent report on open access and other contributions by Science-Metrix to the Science and Engineering Indicators (http://science-metrix.com/en/news#/en/news/the-national-science-foundation-releases-the-science-and-engineering-indicators-2018).

Science-Metrix’ report on open access is available here: http://www.science-metrix.com/en/publications/reports#/en/oa-report.

When we produced the report, we had papers from ResearchGate in the oaFindr dataset that we used to produce the data for the NSF. In late December, we decided to remove academic social networks (ASNs) from our dataset (namely ResearchGate papers, as academia.edu could not be harvested and served in a useable manner).

Reasons for removing these articles from the OA dataset include 1) a highly divided librarian/policy/measurement community on whether these should be included in a dataset on “OA,” with 1science and Science-Metrix ending up being caught between a rock and a hard place; 2) too much rogue OA (or Robin Hood OA depending on how you see it); 3) ResearchGate shrinking hyper fast in the recent months making it difficult for 1science to maintain a coherent index; and 4) neither ResearchGate nor Academia.edu being interested in working with us despite repeated calls for this.

We are keeping an eye on ASNs and may include some or all of them again in our index and analytics on OA in the future. We hope that once things settle down and once it is clear ASNs store mostly copyright-abiding articles, journal publishers will start working with them, allowing them to be a venue for self-archiving. Speaking on my own behalf, and not that of 1science or Science-Metrix, I strongly feel academic social networks are an important part of the solution to open access, and decidedly the more modern way of sharing articles.

The effect of this removal can be seen in the figure immediately below, which suggests that ResearchGate did not have such a big effect on the recent front, or on quite old papers; it was making “intermediately” old papers available to a larger number of users.


[cid:image002.png at 01D39424.80C6EBD0]

Considering the 1findr database as the measuring container, and the oaFindr technology as developed by 1science, the proportion of freely downloadable paper has dropped by 10 percentage points, that is, from 53% to 43%, by excluding ResearchGate from the index. Considering that oaFindr recall is between 85% and 90%, the percentage of papers available for free download, two years after publication is close to 50% when retrieving papers from heterogeneous, mostly copyright-abiding sources on the public internet.

I would like to learn about your opinion on the role of academic social networks in open access, especially in the “post-cleanup” environment that will follow the current removal of copyright-protected papers from ResearchGate. The following questions are particularly important:


  1.  Could/should ASNs be part of the OA solution?
  2.  Provided ASNs become harvestable and provide non-obfuscated, more permanent hyperlinks to articles, could they provide an alternative to institutional repositories?
  3.  Considering that many publishers explicitly or implicitly forbid self-archiving on ASNs, should the community pressure journal publishers to allow more self-archiving to be done on ASNs?

Éric

Eric Archambault, PhD
CEO  |  Chef de la direction
1335, Mont-Royal E
Montréal QC Canada  H2J 1Y6

T. 1.514.495.6505 x.111
C. 1.514.518.0823
eric.archambault at science-metrix.com<mailto:eric.archambault at science-metrix.com>
science-metrix.com<http://www.science-metrix.com/>  &  1science.com<http://www.science-metrix.com/>
[cid:image004.png at 01D39424.80C6EBD0]     [cid:image010.png at 01D39424.80C6EBD0]

From: osi2016-25 at googlegroups.com [mailto:osi2016-25 at googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Toby.GREEN at oecd.org
Sent: January 21, 2018 12:06 PM
To: bryan.alexander at gmail.com
Cc: wagner.911 at osu.edu; ghampson at nationalscience.org; osi2016-25 at googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Report on measuring open access - of broad interest

Sadly, this chart from the report sums up the situation for me - progress has stalled (and this is why SciHub is doing so well). As I argued in a paper published last year (https://goo.gl/5CkawM), new thinking beyond green and gold is needed if we’re to get all papers accessible to everyone without embargoes.

[image1.jpeg]
Toby Green

OECD

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