Category Archives: oa.trends

A Bibliometric Study of Open Educational Resources, Open Textbooks, and Academic Librarianship | Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education

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Abstract:  Open Educational Resources (OER) play a key role in reducing the financial burden and increasing the accessibility of learning for students in higher education. OER can be considered an important field of research for academic librarians and supports the democratic mission of academic libraries. This study aimed to track the publication of scholarly literature about OER and higher education from 2002 to 2022 using a bibliometric research methodology. In addition, this research sought to assess the productivity of Library and Information Science (LIS) scholarship on this topic and investigate research trends, like open textbooks. Web of Science (WOS) was searched for publications and the search results were mapped to determine publication productivity, core authors, core journals, and research topics in the scholarly literature about OER and higher education. Research on OER has been steadily increasing since 2002, and this study indicates that research has increased significantly on the topic in the last six years. The data in this study support that most productivity in research on this topic is in the field of Education, but also found a presence of scholarship on the topic in the field of LIS.

Report to Congress on Financing Mechanisms For Open Access Publishing of Federally Funded Research

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The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) submits this report to the Appropriations Committees of the Senate and the House in fulfillment of the requirement in the Committee Report accompanying the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023 (P.L. 117-328) for financing mechanisms for open access publishing of federally funded research.1 According to that Report, “The Committee recognizes the considerable progress made by OSTP” and “encourages OSTP to continue its efforts to coordinate the implementation of public access policies across Federal departments and agencies and to identify additional opportunities to enhance access to the results of Federally funded research.” At the same time, the Committee expressed concern about how mechanisms for financing open access publishing “may present growing barriers to knowledge generation and sharing,” noting that there are “limited data on the subject.”

As defined by UNESCO, the term “open access publishing” refers to “the provision of free access to peer reviewed, scholarly and research information to all. It requires that the rights holder grants worldwide irrevocable right of access to copy, use, distribute, transmit, and make derivative works in any format for any lawful activities with proper attribution to the original author.”2 Recent technological and policy changes around the world have enabled free and immediate access to publicly funded research. OSTP, in collaboration with its federal partners and in consultation with external stakeholders, has been tracking the trends in opening public access to federally funded research, including trends in open access publishing. These efforts illustrate a highly complex, rapidly evolving, and vitally important scholarly communication ecosystem. Within this system, academic publishers can be viewed as a platform that matches research readers with research writers. By providing distributional and certification services, these publishers help mediate research incentives, interactions, and impact.

For research readers, substantial progress has been made in making new articles available to everyone quickly and without charge through various models for open access publishing. These readers include students, researchers, policymakers, advocates, and members of the broader public, who may not have access to paywalled articles through institutional subscriptions or who may not be able to pay to read an article. In its 2022 public access guidance, OSTP holds that: “Financial means and privileged access must never be the pre-requisites to realizing the benefits of federally funded research that the American public deserves.”3 The goal of federal public access policies is therefore to ensure that federal investments go towards unlocking knowledge supported by American taxpayers so the benefits of federally supported research can benefit all of America.

 

Varieties of diffusion in academic publishing: How status and legitimacy influence growth trajectories of new innovations – Siler – Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology – Wiley Online Library

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Abstract:  Open Access (OA) publishing has progressed from an initial fringe idea to a still-growing, major component of modern academic communication. The proliferation of OA publishing presents a context to examine how new innovations and institutions develop. Based on analyses of 1,296,304 articles published in 83 OA journals, we analyze changes in the institutional status, gender, age, citedness, and geographical locations of authors over time. Generally, OA journals tended towards core-to-periphery diffusion patterns. Specifically, journal authors tended to decrease in high-status institutional affiliations, male and highly cited authors over time. Despite these general tendencies, there was substantial variation in the diffusion patterns of OA journals. Some journals exhibited no significant demographic changes, and a few exhibited periphery-to-core diffusion patterns. We find that although both highly and less-legitimate journals generally exhibit core-to-periphery diffusion patterns, there are still demographic differences between such journals. Institutional and cultural legitimacy—or lack thereof—affects the social and intellectual diffusion of new OA journals.

 

Investigating Global Trends in Open Access: The Influence of Policies, Culturalization, and Funds on the Future of Iran’s Scientific Position

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Abstract:  Objective: Previous research has shown that the number of open access documents in the world is increasing. Although the speed of this phenomenon is worthy of attention, some supporters of science want this process to be faster. One of the important challenges of open access for the country is to cover its relatively high costs, and along with that, due to sanctions, it is also important to predict the methods of paying these costs. Anticipating the necessary arrangements in this field, including credit provision, policy making and cultural building, requires knowledge of the speed of progress of free access in the world. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate the trend of open access development worldwide and its impact on Iran’s international scientific standing and to provide solutions in this field.

Methodology: This research is an applied and survey-based study, conducted with a bibliometric approach. The study population consists of the data on 23 years of golden open access obtained from Clarivate and Incites.

Findings: The trend towards open access publishing is expected to continue in the most prestigious journals worldwide in the next 10 to 13 years. However, the growth rate of this trend is not uniform across all fields. The findings indicate that over the past five years, Iran ranks fifth among the countries with the lowest percentage of open access documents. This is happening while the share of open access documents is increasing rapidly in most countries. Also, major publishers are rapidly increasing their share of open access documents. Additionally, while journals with higher impact factors tend to publish more open access documents, the proportion of open access documents in journals with different citation degrees is relatively consistent.

Conclusion: The future of open access will be affected by the approach of financial sponsors in science, publishers and universities and research centers, but sooner or later a large part of the articles will be published as open access, an issue that will affect the future of the country’s scientific position, especially with regard to financial dimensions. It will have a significant impact. The development of international scientific interactions, the development of interactions with financial sponsors of international science, policy-making, cultural creation and funding are the solutions facing this phenomenon. The formation of a consortium to pay the cost of processing articles as a unit at the country level and the formation of a consortium that includes both the subscription of databases and the payment of the cost of processing articles are among the solutions that increase the possibility of bargaining with publishers. Adding the country’s science and technology funds to this consortium will increase the possibility of bargaining again.

Clarivate Annual G20 Scorecard Analyzes Global Research Performance Trends Across G20 Nations | STM Publishing News

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“The G20 scorecard presents an exceptional vantage point on the strengths and challenges of each G20 nation’s research ecosystem. By assessing key indicators such as research output, citations, collaboration networks and innovation potential, the scorecard offers invaluable insights into the changing patterns of worldwide scientific advancement.

Key findings in the 2023 G20 scorecard include: …

Brazil’s output in humanities is three times more likely than the G20 average to be published in an open access (OA) journal. Brazil’s emphasis on OA publication in the humanities sets it apart and may have implications for access to knowledge and the dissemination of research findings….

 

Canada boasts an above-average proportion of output in social sciences, medicine, humanities and arts, although OA output is below average in all categories. Canada’s diverse research output and below-average OA rates prompt discussions on access to research findings and collaboration patterns…

In the United Kingdom, in 2022 more than half of output was published in OA journals. Collaborative CNCI remains above the world average but has fallen during the last decade. The U.K.’s increasing OA output and evolving collaboration trends signal shifts in research dissemination and partnership strategies….”

Code sharing increases citations, but remains uncommon | Research Square

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Abstract:  Biologists increasingly rely on computer code, reinforcing the importance of published code for transparency, reproducibility, training, and a basis for further work. Here we conduct a literature review examining temporal trends in code sharing in ecology and evolution publications since 2010, and test for an influence of code sharing on citation rate. We find that scientists are overwhelmingly (95%) failing to publish their code and that there has been no significant improvement over time, but we also find evidence that code sharing can considerably improve citations, particularly when combined with open access publication.

 

An Index, A Publisher and An Unequal Global Research Economy | CGHE

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“This is the story of how a publisher and a citation index turned the science communication system into a highly profitable global industry. Over the course of seventy years, academic journal articles have become commodities, and their meta-data a further source of revenue. It begins in Washington at the end of a second World War, when the US Government agrees a massive increase in funding for research, after Vannevar Bush champions basic research as the ‘pacemaker of technological progress’. The resulting post-war growth in scientific publishing creates opportunities for information scientists and publishers alike. During the 1950s, two men – Robert Maxwell and Eugene Garfield – begin to experiment with their blueprint for the research economy. Maxwell created an ‘international’ publisher – Pergamon Press – charming the editors of elite, not-for-profit society journals into signing commercial contracts. Garfield invented the science citation index to help librarians manage this growing flow of knowledge. Over time, the index gradually became commercially viable as universities and publishers used it to measure the ‘impact’ of their researchers and journals.

Sixty years later, the global science system has become a citation economy, with academic credibility mediated by the currency produced by the two dominant commercial citation indexes: Elsevier’s Scopus and Clarivate’s Web of Science. The reach of these citation indexes and their data analytics is amplified by digitisation, computing power and financial investment. Scholarly reputation is now increasingly measured by journal rankings, ‘impact factors’ and ‘h-indexes’. Non-Anglophone journals are disproportionately excluded from these indexes, reinforcing the stratification of academic credibility geographies and endangering long established knowledge ecosystems. Researchers in the majority world are left marginalised and have no choice but to go ever faster, resorting to research productivism to keep up. The result is an integrity-technology ‘arms race’. Responding to media stories about a crisis of scientific fraud, publishers and indexes turn to AI tools to deal with what is seen as an epidemic of academic ‘gaming’ and manipulation.

Does the unfettered growth in publishing ‘outputs’, moral panics over research integrity and widening global divides signal a science system in crisis? And is the ‘Open Science’ vision under threat, as the ‘author-pays’ publishing business model becomes dominant? With the scientific commons now largely reliant on citations as its currency, the future of science communication is far from certain.”

Velez-Estevez et. al. (2023) New trends in bibliometric APIs: A comparative analysis | Information Processing & Management

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Velez-Estevez, A., I. J. Perez, P. García-Sánchez, J. A. Moral-Munoz, and M. J. Cobo. ‘New Trends in Bibliometric APIs: A Comparative Analysis’. Information Processing & Management 60, no. 4 (1 July 2023): 103385. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2023.103385.

Abstract:

The science of science practice requires the analysis of large and complex bibliometric data. Traditional data exporting from companies’ websites is not sufficient, so APIs are used to access a larger corpus. Therefore, this study aims not only to establish a taxonomy but also to offer a comparative analysis of 44 bibliographic APIs from various non-profit and commercial organizations, analyzing their characteristics and metadata with descriptive analysis, their possible bibliometric analyses, and the interoperability of the APIs across four different data categories: general, content, search, and query modes. The study found that Clarivate Analytics and Elsevier offer highly versatile APIs, while non-profit organizations, such as OpenCitations and OurResearch promote the Open Science philosophy. Most organizations offer free access to APIs for non-commercial purposes, but some have limitations on metadata retrieval. However, CrossRef, OpenCitations, or OpenAlex have no restrictions on the metadata retrieval. Co-author analysis using author names and bibliometric evaluation using citations are the types of analyses that can be done with the data provided by most APIs. DOI, PubMedID, and PMCID are the most versatile identifiers for extending metadata in the APIs. Semantic Scholar, Dimensions, ORCID, and Embase are the APIs that offer the most extensibility. Considering the obtained results, there is no single API that gathers all the information needed to perform any bibliometric analysis. Combining two or more APIs may be the most appropriate option to cover as much information as possible and enrich reports and analyses. This study contributes to advancing the understanding and use of APIs in research practice.

Geriatric and Gerontology Research: A Scientometric Investigation of Open Access Journal Articles Indexed in the Scopus Database

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Abstract:  Background

Scientometric analyses of specific topics in geriatrics and gerontology have grown robustly in scientific literature. However, analyses using holistic and interdisciplinary approaches are scarce in this field of research. Objective: This article aimed to demonstrate research trends and provide an overview of bibliometric information on publications related to geriatrics and gerontology.

Methods
We identified relevant articles on geriatrics and gerontology using the search terms “geriatrics,” “gerontology,” “older people,” and “elderly”. VOSviewer was used to perform bibliometric analysis.

Results
A total of 858 analyzed articles were published in 340 journals. Among the ten most contributory journals, five were in the United States (US), with the top journal being the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. The US was the leading country in research, followed by Japan, Canada, and the United Kingdom. A total of 5,278 keywords were analyzed. In the analysis of research hotspots, the main global research topics in geriatrics and gerontology were older adults (n=663), education and training (n=471), and adults aged 80 years (n= 461). These were gradually expanded to include areas related to caring for older adults, such as geriatric assessments (n=395).

Conclusion
These results provide direction for fellow researchers to conduct studies in geriatrics and gerontology. In addition, they provide government departments with guidance for formulating and implementing policies that affect older adults, not only in setting academic and professional priorities but also in understanding key topics related to them.

Open access initiatives in European countries: analysis of trends and policies | Emerald Insight

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Abstract:  Purpose. This paper aims to analyze open access (OA) scholarly publishing patterns as well as OA policies and mandates across European countries.

Design/methodology/approach The study is based on a descriptive research approach using data from Web resources, directories and bibliographic and citation databases, namely, DOAJ, OpenDOAR, SCImago journal and Country Ranking portal, ROARMAP and Web of Science.

Findings The findings indicate that the initiatives and measures in Europe that promote OA are adequate. OA journals and digital repositories have progressively increased over the past two decades. Of the total journals (n = 25,231) published worldwide and indexed in Scopus, 53% are published in European countries, with 23.7% being OA journals. In total, 34% of the OA repositories (n = 5,714) are in European countries. The proportion of OA journal papers has grown significantly in all European countries, with a 14.3% annual growth rate. The average proportion of OA publications in European countries is significantly higher (39.07%) than the world average (30.16%), with a clear inclination for making research literature openly accessible via the green OA route (79.41%) compared to the gold OA route (52.30%). Most European research funders and institutions have required researchers to make OA available for their research findings, either by publishing them in OA journals or depositing accepted manuscripts in repositories.

Research limitations/implications The study analyzed OA trends in Europe; other continents and countries were not included in the analysis. The study only described OA policies and mandates; the extent to which the OA policies and mandates were implemented was not studied. However, the results of the study may be helpful to policymakers, funders, research institutions and universities in other countries in adopting and implementing OA policies and mandates.

Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the study is the first that used multiple data sources for investigating different facets of OA publishing in European countries, including OA journals, digital repositories, research output, mandates and policies for publicly funded research. The findings will be helpful for researchers and policymakers interested in promoting OA adoption among researchers worldwide.

Latin American geography education research trends in open access journals from the twenty-first century: International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education: Vol 31, No 3

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Abstract:  Recent projects, declarations, and articles around the globe addressed the status and development of geography education, where the discipline is standing, and what should be done to enhance the quality and quantity of research. Nevertheless, the paucity of research and limited approaches in Latin America about the type of studies published has made difficult the promotion and development of research lines, or even more an international comparative perspective. Therefore, the aim of the study is to show the spatiotemporal trends and existing research lines in geography education, extracted from 1880 articles published in 140 open access journals within the region from 2000 to 2019. The findings showed a consistent growth of research especially after 2010, just a few journals gathering most publications, and the intraregional disparity among countries on the evolution of the number and type of studies. Although Latin American researchers increased the number of publications in all research lines, the scientific production has been more prolific in five topics: theories, philosophy and debates, teacher education, teaching methodologies, instructional materials and resources, and student’s learning. In contrast, studies on assessment, technologies, fieldwork, research practices, history and educational policies have received less attention from scholars.

Research Trends in the Field of Emergency Remote Teaching: A Bibliometric Analysis of Open Access Literature | Online Learning

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Abstract:  Throughout the period of pandemic, many studies have been conducted on emergency remote teaching (ERT) in different fields and from different perspectives, which reveal that there has been a lack of a comprehensive map showing the rapid and continuous responses of these studies to the process. The purpose of this research is to analyze open access research on ERT using bibliometric method, and to reveal current trends in this field. VOSviewer software was used for data analysis; the data collection process was shaped using the PRISMA framework. 238 studies were included in the analysis. The distribution of the open access studies analyzed in the field of emergency remote teaching by year, type of publication, subject, country, and sources was examined; citation analysis (by journal and publication), authorship patterns and collaboration, common word analyses are included. It was found out that these open access publications mainly consisted of journal articles and were dated 2020 and 2021; most of the publications were in the field of educational sciences. Based on common word analysis, the most important topics that are addressed in studies on the ERT process are the process of pandemic, distance education and higher education, while the challenges experienced regarding teachers and pedagogic issues during the process, teacher education, student-related characteristics (such as self-regulated learning-motivation-academic success) and participation are found to be frequently studied topics. The concepts of instructional design, collaborative learning, social presence, and assessment are also among the topics covered. It is anticipated that the implications for policy and practice based on the examination of research trends will have a significant effect on the structuring of future online learning environments, as well as the ERT designed for emergencies.

 

Full article: Trends in Research Data Management and Academic Health Sciences Libraries

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Abstract:  Spurred by the National Institute of Health mandating a data management and sharing plan as a requirement of grant funding, research data management has exploded in importance for librarians supporting researchers and research institutions. This editorial examines the role and direction of libraries in this process from several viewpoints. Key markers of success include collaboration, establishing new relationships, leveraging existing relationships, accessing multiple avenues of communication, and building niche expertise and cachè as a valued and trustworthy partner.

 

STM Trends 2026 : The Beauty of Open at Scale

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“Throughout the next three to five years, there will be a sharp rise of Open Access within scholarly communications. In an eco-system that is Open-at-Scale, there will be many new opportunities for scalable tools for knowledge discovery on massively available content. We expect that this will likely have a significant impact on the ecosystem of scholarly communications, most likely in a very positive and beautiful way – and, as the motto says: it will change things At Scale….

One of our future forecasts is also that in an Open Access world the competition for the best authors and peer reviewers will intensify….

A world of Open Access needs a new locus of trust. Information will appear in many places and in many versions. We need to secure the Version of Record that was peer-reviewed….”

A decade of changes in OA and non-OA journal publication and production – Eungi Kim, Madhu Sudhan Atteraya, 2023

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Abstract:  The objective of this study was to explore the trends in the publication and production of open access (OA) and non-OA journals and articles over the last decade. Non-OA journals include subscription and hybrid journals, the articles of which cannot be freely accessed by researchers. To conduct this study, we used SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) data from 2011 to 2021. In analyzing the SJR data, we categorized publishers by the number of journals and articles published. The results showed the following: (a) although the number of OA journals has increased rapidly between 2011 and 2021, their share of total publications is still significantly lower than that of non-OA journals; (b) between 2011 and 2021, the number of publishers of non-OA journals had decreased slightly, while the number of OA journal publishers has increased rapidly; (c) publishers of all sizes increased the production of OA journal articles between 2011 and 2021, but the share of top publishers increased the most; and (d) MDPI, as a born-OA publisher, has become a global leader in OA journal article publishing in recent years.