Meta-Research: Evaluating the impact of open access policies on research institutions
- Centre for Culture and Technology, Curtin University, Australia
- Curtin University, Australia
- Curtin Institute for Computation , Curtin University, Australia
Abstract
The proportion of research outputs published in open access journals or made available on other freely-accessible platforms has increased over the past two decades, driven largely by funder mandates, institutional policies, grass-roots advocacy, and changing attitudes in the research community. However, the relative effectiveness of these different interventions has remained largely unexplored. Here we present a robust, transparent and updateable method for analysing how these interventions affect the open access performance of individual institutes. We studied 1,207 institutions from across the world, and found that, in 2017, the top-performing universities published around 80-90% of their research open access. The analysis also showed that publisher-mediated (gold) open access was popular in Latin American and African universities, whereas the growth of open access in Europe and North America has mostly been driven by repositories.
Data availability
Our technical infrastructure is constructed based on the aim to make openly available both the data and analysis code as much as possible. The derived datasets for analysis, visualisation codes, and the SQL queries used to generate the derived datasets are all made available online as described in Supplementary file 1. Raw data is not provided to preserve the anonymity of institutions and respect the terms of service of data providers.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Curtin University of Technology
- Chun-Kai Huang
- Cameron Neylon
- Richard Hosking
- Lucy Montgomery
- Katie S Wilson
- Alkim Ozaygen
- Chloe Brookes-Kenworthy
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2020, Huang et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 6,367
- views
-
- 572
- downloads
-
- 55
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Meta-Research: Evaluating the impact of open access policies on research institutions
eLife 9:e57067.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.57067
Further reading
-
eLife’s Executable Research Article lets authors include live code, data and interactive figures in their published paper.
-
How successful have open access policies been?
