Join the Open Access Books Network (OABN) in a chat with Christina Drummond and Lucy Montgomery to discuss the OAeBU Usage Data project and the new developments the work will take over the coming years.
Abstract: The study examined the utilization of open access journals by Library and Information Science (LIS) undergraduate at Delta State University, Abraka. Two research questions and one hypothesis guided the study. A descriptive survey design was used by the researchers. The population of the study comprised 477 LIS undergraduates, and a simple random sampling technique was used to determine the sample size which is 217 students, representing 45% of the total population. The questionnaire was the instrument used for data collection. The questionnaire was validated by two experts and the Cronbach Alpha was used to establish the reliability of the instrument which yielded 0.75. Data were analysed with frequency count, simple percentages, and Statistical Product and Service Solutions (SPSS) version 23 was used to generate the mean, and standard deviation while Pearson’s product-moment correlation coefficient was used to test the hypothesis at 0.05 significant levels. The findings revealed that the students had a high level of awareness and a high level of usage of open access journals. From the test of the hypothesis, the study discovered that there is a significant relationship between the level of awareness and the use of open access journals. Hence, the student’s level of awareness positively influenced the use of open access journals. Based on the findings, the researchers recommended that the library management and lecturers should continue to promote the use of open access journals generally among the students to sustain its use.
“Open Access usage is a complex topic. In this webinar, we’ll look at what metrics can be collected, and whether we should look at the data globally, or at an institutional level, possibly to evaluate affiliated institutions’ APC payments or open access agreements.
We will discuss the topic both from a publisher and a library perspective, with panelists sharing their experiences and opinion on the feasibility of conducting a usage-based analysis of open access articles to determine their value to institutions and libraries….”
“The Open Science Observatory (https://osobservatory.openaire.eu) is an OpenAIRE platform showcasing a collection of indicators and visualisations that help policy makers and research administrators better understand the Open Science landscape in Europe, across and within countries.
The broader context: As the number of Open Science mandates have been increasing across countries and scientific fields, so has the need to track Open Science practices and uptake in a timely and granular manner. The Open Science Observatory assists the monitoring, and consequently the enhancing, of open science policy uptake across different dimensions of interest, revealing weak spots and hidden potential. Its release comes in a timely fashion, in order to support UNESCO’s global initiative for Open Science and the European Open Science Cloud (the current development and enhancement is co-funded by the EOSC Future H2020 project and will appear in the EOSC Portal). …
How does it work: Based on the OpenAIRE Research Graph, following open science principles and an evidence-based approach, the Open Science Observatory provides simple metrics and more advanced composite indicators which cover various aspects of open science uptake such us
different openness metrics
FAIR principles
Plan S compatibility & transformative agreements
APCs
as well as measures related to the outcomes of Open Access research output as they relate to
network & collaborations
usage statistics and citations
Sustainable Development Goals
across and within European countries. ”
By Christina Drummond
While the term “usage data” most often refers to webpage views and downloads associated with a given book or book chapter, scholarly communications stakeholders have identified a near future where linked open access (OA) scholarship usage data analytics could directly inform publishing, discovery, and collections development in addition to impact reporting.
In the 2020-2022 Exploring Open Access Ebook Usage research project supported by the Mellon Foundation, publisher and library representatives expressed their interests in using OA eBook Usage (OAeBU) data analytics to inform overall OA program investment, strategy and fundraising. A report summarizing a year of virtual focus groups noted multiple operational use cases for OA book usage analytics, spanning book marketing, sales, and editorial strategy; collections development and hosting; institutional OA program strategy, reporting, and investment; and OA impact reporting for institutions and authors to support reporting to their funding agencies, donors, and policy-makers.
These are the 20 countries that together account for more than 90% of all Sci_Hub downloads worldwide made in the last month.
Source: https://twitter.com/sci_hub_/status/1554926638189666310
Abstract: Knowledge of how science is consumed in public domains is essential for understanding the role of science in human society. Here we examine public use and public funding of science by linking tens of millions of scientific publications from all scientific fields to their upstream funding support and downstream public uses across three public domains—government documents, news media and marketplace invention. We find that different public domains draw from various scientific fields in specialized ways, showing diverse patterns of use. Yet, amidst these differences, we find two important forms of alignment. First, we find universal alignment between what the public consumes and what is highly impactful within science. Second, a field’s public funding is strikingly aligned with the field’s collective public use. Overall, public uses of science present a rich landscape of specialized consumption, yet, collectively, science and society interface with remarkable alignment between scientific use, public use and funding.
Abstract: Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present conceptual definitions for digital object use and reuse. Typically, assessment of digital repository content struggles to go beyond traditional usage metrics such as clicks, views or downloads. This is problematic for galleries, libraries, archives, museums and repositories (GLAMR) practitioners because use assessment does not tell a nuanced story of how users engage with digital content and objects.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper reviews prior research and literature aimed at defining use and reuse of digital content in GLAMR contexts and builds off of this group’s previous research to devise a new model for defining use and reuse called the use-reuse matrix.
Findings
This paper presents the use-reuse matrix, which visually represents eight categories and numerous examples of use and reuse. Additionally, the paper explores the concept of “permeability” and its bearing on the matrix. It concludes with the next steps for future research and application in the development of the Digital Content Reuse Assessment Framework Toolkit (D-CRAFT).
Practical implications
The authors developed this model and definitions to inform D-CRAFT, an Institute of Museum and Library Services National Leadership Grant project. This toolkit is being developed to help practitioners assess reuse at their own institutions.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is one of the first to propose distinct definitions that describe and differentiate between digital object use and reuse in the context of assessing digital collections and data.
Abstract: Data sharing can accelerate scientific discovery while increasing return on investment beyond the researcher or group that produced them. Data repositories enable data sharing and preservation over the long term, but little is known about scientists’ perceptions of them and their perspectives on data management and sharing practices. Using focus groups with scientists from five disciplines (atmospheric and earth science, computer science, chemistry, ecology, and neuroscience), we asked questions about data management to lead into a discussion of what features they think are necessary to include in data repository systems and services to help them implement the data sharing and preservation parts of their data management plans. Participants identified metadata quality control and training as problem areas in data management. Additionally, participants discussed several desired repository features, including: metadata control, data traceability, security, stable infrastructure, and data use restrictions. We present their desired repository features as a rubric for the research community to encourage repository utilization. Future directions for research are discussed.
Abstract: This presentation introduced attendees to the benefits and limitations of Unsub, a data analysis tool designed by OurResearch. In this presentation, OurResearch co-founder, Heather Piwowar, demonstrated the use of Unsub for analyzing usage and cost data on a library’s “Big Deal.” The other two presenters, Jessica Harris of the University of Chicago, and Eric Schares of Iowa State University, discussed how they used the tool at their libraries to make collection development decisions for their libraries’ journal subscriptions.
Overview: Many academic publishers offer hybrid (hybrid OA) open access journals, where some articles in an otherwise subscription-based publication are made openly available. Recently, some funders have pushed for a transformation towards such a hybrid OA business model, where publishing houses are paid for open access publication. To draft, monitor and evaluate such transformative agreements, libraries and their consortia need data on the uptake, costs and impact of hybrid OA.
{HOAD} is a data product to meet this need. The dashboard is packaged as an extension to the R Project for Statistical Computing (an R package), released under an open source license and developed in the open at http://github.com/subugoe/hoad. The package has several components:
APIs to expose data from public bibliometric sources relevant to hybrid OA.
ETL pipelines (extraction, transformation, loading) and accompanying visualisations to answer hybrid OA business questions.
A web application to explore hybrid OA data, including customisation for individual journal portfolios.
The project is based on data gathered by the Crossref DOI registration agency and the OpenAPC initiative. The package is at the Göttingen State and University Libary as part of the DFG-funded eponymous Hybrid Open Access Dashboard project.
An early prototype of the application, including the interactive web frontend is available at https://subugoe.github.io/hoad/.
“Our Vision:
Community Governed Sharing of Quality, Interoperable, Open Access (OA) Book Usage Data
Our Mission:
To champion strategies for the improved publication and management of open-access books by exchanging reliable usage data in a trusted, equitable, and community-governed way.”
“Some final thoughts: (1) Overall usage was a stronger influence on the change in value than the small changes in the proportion of hybrid OA article usage. (2) Despite the range of research activity levels across our institutions, there wasn’t much difference in the proportion of the open versus controlled usage across the site-licensed institutions for either publisher. (3) COVID likely affected these trends, but precisely how was unclear. Did lockdown increase the usage or limit it? Did it affect our two publishers differently? We have no ‘non-COVID’ control unfortunately. (4) If the impact of transformative agreements on the rate of hybrid OA article output influenced these trends, the impact was quite small. Still, with more libraries negotiating transformative agreements, growth in the proportion of OA articles should accelerate. As long as usage in publisher packages continues to grow, cost per controlled use will increase more quickly than cost per use. This new cost per controlled use metric should help libraries track the return on investment from their journal package subscription payments as a growing proportion of underlying articles are free to read.”
Significance
Advocates for open access argue that people need scientific information, although they lack evidence for this. Using Google’s recently developed deep learning natural language processing model, which offers unrivalled comprehension of subtle differences in meaning, 1.6 million people downloading National Academies reports were classified, not just into broad categories such as researchers and teachers but also precisely delineated small groups such as hospital chaplains, veterans, and science fiction authors. The results reveal adults motivated to seek out the most credible sources, engage with challenging material, use it to improve the services they provide, and learn more about the world they live in. The picture contrasts starkly with the dominant narrative of a misinformed and manipulated public targeted by social media.
Abstract
In seeking to understand how to protect the public information sphere from corruption, researchers understandably focus on dysfunction. However, parts of the public information ecosystem function very well, and understanding this as well will help in protecting and developing existing strengths. Here, we address this gap, focusing on public engagement with high-quality science-based information, consensus reports of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). Attending to public use is important to justify public investment in producing and making freely available high-quality, scientifically based reports. We deploy Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), a high-performing, supervised machine learning model, to classify 1.6 million comments left by US downloaders of National Academies reports responding to a prompt asking how they intended to use the report. The results provide detailed, nationwide evidence of how the public uses open access scientifically based information. We find half of reported use to be academic—research, teaching, or studying. The other half reveals adults across the country seeking the highest-quality information to improve how they do their job, to help family members, to satisfy their curiosity, and to learn. Our results establish the existence of demand for high-quality information by the public and that such knowledge is widely deployed to improve provision of services. Knowing the importance of such information, policy makers can be encouraged to protect it.
“A fundamental principle of open access is that publication technology enables the widest possible audience for research findings. However, the extent to which open research is used outside of academia is often underexplored. Drawing on a dataset covering over a million user comments about their use of US National Academies consensus study reports, Ameet Doshi, Diana Hicks, Matteo Zullo and Omar I. Asensio find widespread use of open research in the public sphere….
Our classification project reveals that the impact of these reports extend far beyond the research community (see Results, Fig 1). We find that half of all report downloads are used for non-academic purposes, including to improve the provision of services by medical professionals, local and regional planners, public health workers, and veterans’ advocates, to name just a few of the 64 total categories of report use. Heavy use is made of Academies reports on STEM education and how people learn by teachers, school administrators and teachers’ coaches. Other notable reports with their prominent users included Dying in America (chaplains), Nutrient Requirements for Beef Cattle (farmers), and Best Care at Lower Costs (clinicians and hospital administrators)….
Open access repositories require significant resources, both technological and human, to sustain and innovate. The National Academies Press, for example, has developed an engaging user interface to incentivize browsing and ease of access to NASEM publications. The PubMed Central server, developed and managed by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), requires millions of dollars per year to operate. Our research indicates there is an identifiable payoff to society for these taxpayer investments into people, technology and design to support OA publishing….
Librarians and open access advocates have long presupposed that open access to high-quality scientific knowledge could and should be viewed as a public good. Our empirical research suggests that the initial utopian aspirations regarding the public use and societal impact of OA may indeed rest on sound footing.”