Abstract:  Understanding institutional publishing output is crucial to scholarly communications work. This class will equip participants to analyze article publishing by authors at an institution.

After completing the course, participants will be able to

Gain an understanding of their institution’s publishing output, such as number of publications per year, open access status of the publications, major funders of the research, and estimates of how much funding might be spent toward article processing charges (APCs).
Think critically about institutional publishing data to make sustainable and values-driven scholarly communications decisions.

This course will build on open infrastructure, including Unpaywall and OpenRefine. We will provide examples of how to do analyses in both OpenRefine and Microsoft Excel. 

The course will consist of two parts. In the first, participants will learn how to build a dataset. We will provide lessons about downloading data from different sources: Web of Science, Scopus, and The Lens. (Web of Science and Scopus are subscription databases; The Lens is freely available.) 

In the second part of the course, participants will learn data analysis methods that can help answer questions such as:

Should you cancel or renew a subscription?
Who is funding your institution’s researchers?
Are your institution’s authors using an institutional repository?
Should you accept a publisher’s open access publishing offer?

Library agreements with publishers are at a crucial turning point, as they more and more often include OA publishing. By learning to do these analyses for themselves, participants will be better prepared to enter into negotiations with a publisher. The expertise developed through this course can make the uneven playing field of library-publisher negotiations slightly more even.

Course materials will be openly available. This will be a facilitated course taught by the authors.