libfocus - Irish library blog

8 Feb 2015

The historical evolution of open access publications (OA) between 1996 and 2013

Science Metrics released a study in Oct. 2014 which measured the proportion of open access papers published in peer-reviewed journals at the European and world levels between 1996 and 2013. This study represents the largest scale measurement of open access availability performed to date.

The source for data collection was the Scopus database, which is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature with presently 55 million records, 21,915 titles and 5,000 publishers indexed.

Below is a redacted version of the report’s executive summary; the full report can be accessed here.

The Science Metrics study report assesses the free availability of scholarly publications during the 1996 to 2013 period. A sample of one-quarter of a million records was used to study the historical evolution of open access (OA) between 1996 and 2013 and a larger, one million records sample was used to perform an in-depth assessment of the proportion and scientific impact of OA between 2008 and 2013 in different types of OA, for different scientific fields of knowledge, and for 44 countries, the EU28, ERA, and the world.

As of April 2014, more than 50% of the scientific papers published in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012 can be downloaded for free on the Internet. This is an important finding as only two years ago, in April 2013, the proportion of papers that was freely available was just a hair below 50% (49.54%) in 2011 and did not reach that mark for any other year. On average, the citation advantage of OA papers is 40.3% while the citation disadvantage is 27% for non-OA papers (based on a total sample size of 209,000 papers).

The growth of OA appears as the result of four main forces: (1) historical growth in the interest in OA, which translates into new papers being increasingly available for free; (2) the growing interest in OA also translates into actors increasingly making old papers available for free; (3) OA policies that allow for delaying OA to scientific papers with embargo periods produce a concomitant disembargoing of scientific articles, which creates additional growth in old papers being made available for free; and (4) the number of published scientific papers is growing, so even for a stable proportion of OA, the number of OA papers would keep growing.

Other forms of OA—Gold OA Papers (that is, those with article processing charges published in subscription journals or so-called hybrid journals), Green DOA and Gold DOA (embargoed self-archiving and embargoed journals), ROA (Robin Hood or Rogue OA) and papers archived in non-institutional repositories such as ResearchGate—account for a large part of the pie. This large, heterogeneous set contributes the largest proportion of OA papers, and there is therefore an urgent need to disaggregate this category. More research and more careful classification and thus finer-grained measures are required to better understand how these various categories contribute to OA growth, what their pattern of time-delay is, what their transiency is (especially of the ROA), how important backfilling is and how far back it goes.

The fields with the greatest proportion of OA are General Science & Technology (Adjusted
OA=90%), Biomedical Research (71%), Mathematics & Statistics (68%), and Biology (66%).
OA is not as commonly used in Visual & Performing Arts (Adjusted OA=25%), Communication
& Textual Studies (31%), Historical Studies (34%), Engineering (35%), and Philosophy & Theology (35%).

Gold OA availability is greatest in general S&T (58% of the sampled papers) and lowest in general arts, humanities & social sciences (2.6%); it is also very low in the visual & performing arts (2.8%), built environment & design (3.5%) and engineering (4.1%). Other fields with high availability in Gold journals include biology (17%), agriculture, fisheries & forestry (16%), and public health & health services (16%).

All the fields derive an OA citation advantage. Paradoxically, many of the fields where the OA
proportion is low have a sizeable citation advantage, such as the visual & performing arts (80% more cited), communication & textual studies (66%), philosophy & textual studies (63%), historical studies (55%), general arts, humanities and social sciences (51%), and engineering (38%). An explanation to this is likely to be that papers from researchers in these fields are more likely to have their papers used as there are fewer OA papers available.

Citation statistics on Gold journals require careful interpretation. First, many Gold journals are younger and smaller, and these factors have an adverse effect on the citation rate and hence on measured citation scores. Authors frequently prefer reading and citing established journals, and it is therefore a challenge to start a journal from scratch, and to have authors submit high-quality articles. It takes time to build a reputation and to attract established authors.

It is interesting to note that the Netherlands, which is also scientific publishers' land of predilection, is the EU country with the largest share of papers available in OA form (74%) as a whole for papers
published in the 2008–2013 period and available for free download as of April 2014.

Within the European Union, Green OA is more widely used in Portugal (16.3%), Ireland (15.8%), France (14.0%), and Belgium (13.8%), and least used in Lithuania (4.5%), Malta (5.0%), Croatia (5.2%), and Romania (5.3%). The countries that least use Gold OA journals are France (6.6%), the United Kingdom (7.2%), and Belgium (7.4%).

Green OA is free, and the majority of publishers accept that papers can be self-archived in one form or another (pre-print, post-print with final revision, or PDF) with no delay. Moreover, two-thirds of Gold OA journals do not levy author processing charges (Suber, 2013). There are free avenues to OA and cost should not be construed as a barrier.

The percentage of peer-reviewed articles published in Gold OA journals indexed in Scopus for
1996 was only 0.9%, but grew to 12.8% for 2012, the annual growth rate being 18% for this period, which means that the proportion of articles in Gold OA journals doubles every 4.1 years (see Figure 7 below). Scopus covers less than half of the quantity of journals listed in the DOAJ, so this figure likely underestimates the true extent of the role played by Gold OA journals.

Source: science-metrix.com

For a discussion around the rationale on diamond open access (DOA) publishing, see Fuchs, C. & Sandoval, M. (2013). The diamond model of open access publishing: Why policy makers, scholars, universities, libraries, labour unions and the publishing world need to take non-commercial, non-profit open access serious. TripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique, 11(2), pp. 428-443.

Suber, P. (2013). Open access: six myths to put to rest. The Guardian. 21 October 2013.
http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2013/oct/21/open-access-myths-peter-suber-harvard.

From Coffee to Cataloguing; experiences of a newbie archivist

(In this guest post archivist Emma Horgan talks about her experiences in qualifying as an archivist, and the events which led to her current role as archivist for the Central Bank of Ireland)

For me it all began at a postgraduate study fair, held to inform final year undergraduates of their further academic options. Having finally succeeded in persuading both my parents and myself that I would make a very poor teacher, and no amount of holidays would change that, I began searching for an alternate career path.

It was whilst speaking with the UCD representative that the MA in Archives and Records Management was first mentioned as one I might be interested in. The initial brief outline was enough to pique my interest and I decided to investigate further. All available course material seemed to be limited to that which was given on the UCD official prospectus, with no available information on the experiences of previous students. But, as the prospect of career in archives was sounding more and more attractive, and the UCD MA was the only accredited option in the country, I decided to take a chance and applied. This marked the beginning of an arduous application process which culminated in the most daunting interview of my life so far. The first stages of applying for the MA involved submitting two separate forms, supporting documentation and a personal statement outlining why I wanted to be an archivist. I had wisely sought the advice of the UCC careers office, their assistance and guidance enabled me to craft an appropriate personal statement. “I want to an archivist because I like reading old books” wasn’t going to cut it here. The interview tested my knowledge and expectations of both the MA and the archival profession as a whole, as well as requiring me to field questions such as “What contribution do you see yourself making to the archival profession in the future?” Somehow I successfully met all the requirements and was offered a place.

As I had begun the application process quite close to the deadline I completed my required work experience after I had acquired a place, rather than prior as most applicants do. The placement consisted of six weeks in the Boole library UCC, under the care of Martin O Connor and Breeda Herlihy. Despite my limited time on placement, I was given the opportunity to experience all functions and departments of the library including the archive, which gave me fresh insight into how the information management professions operate, both on a daily basis and in conjunction with other. The experience also provided me with many networking opportunities and introduced me to the concept of utilising social media, in particular Twitter, as a professional networking tool. To this day I am an ardent user of Twitter for this purpose.

The MA itself can be most accurately described with the adjectives comprehensive and intense. An extremely diverse workload is packed into the seven months of academic classes. As well as modules providing an introduction to the various types of archival material, the course also provides classes in archival theory which serve as the foundations upon which to build our other teachings. Although perhaps not the most exciting of classes, learning and understanding the theoretical background of the profession is important if new professionals are to effectively bring their repositories into the future. But, being able to talk the talk is no good if you can’t walk the walk, so two separate cataloguing projects were also a component of the course, one single, and one group project. These had to be completed to strict deadlines, and whilst also attending classes, writing essays and selecting a suitable thesis topic. This meant many late nights in the UCD archive, which is where the coffee in the title comes in!

Outside of the academic workload, the final element of the MA is a two week work experience period, which the collage organises, to take place in March. I was placed in the Pernod Ricard Archive in Midleton, Co. Cork, my task being to fully catalogue all the wages ledgers of the Midleton Distillery. I seized this as an opportunity to demonstrate what I had learned, and apply it in a real world setting. It was quite a pleasant surprise to realise how much I had learned in just a few months, and that I was now capable of cataloguing a ‘real’ archival collection to the required professional standard. At the culmination of my work experience I was offered a two month contract to return and conduct further cataloguing projects, which led to my being recruited by Arcline, the archives and records management consultancy. I completed the two month body of work concurrently with my MA thesis. This meant for an intense few months, but it is not a decision I regret taking. For an archival professional who’s still wet behind the ears, every opportunity to enhance both my skills base and my CV was one to be seized. Following on from my work in Pernod Ricard, I was referred to the Central Bank of Ireland by Arcline in September 2014. The bank at the time was recruiting a temporary archivist on a three month contract to catalogue a small collection within the Bank’s archival holdings. This is a position I still hold today and I am now actively involved in the establishment of a successful archival service for the Central Bank.

In the end it was combination of blind luck and hard work that got me where I am today. To other newly qualified professionals I offer this piece of advice; give 100% to each and every opportunity offered you. It is impossible to predict the future so who knows where it might lead?

Finding Furlong: insights into the library of a nineteenth century theologian

Guest post by Mick O’Dwyer, Special Collections and Archives, Maynooth University

The Russell Library at Maynooth University is home to many unique treasures. In amongst cuneiform tablets from the Babylonian period, incunabula from 1470 onwards, and medieval manuscripts, resides a lesser known collection of significant importance – the Furlong Collection. Comprised of the personal library of the former Bishop of Ferns, Thomas Furlong (1802-75), this collection is a unique treasure of the Russell Library.

Handwritten catalogue of the Library of the House of Missions Enniscorthy - Picture courtesy of Mick O Dwyer

Thomas Furlong was born in 1802 in Moyglass, Co Wexford. The son of large land-owning parents, he spent five years in the seminary in Wexford before arriving in Maynooth in 1819. Ordained as a Priest in 1826, Bishop Furlong served in Maynooth for over 30 years, taking up posts as Dean, Professor of Humanity, Rhetoric, and Theology. He was ordained Bishop of Ferns in 1857.
An improvement in the college grant in 1845 resulted in better pay for Maynooth staff and PhD students. Thomas Furlong was one of the many who used these extra funds to create substantial personal libraries. His collection was so comprehensive that he reported to the 1853 Maynooth Commission that “having endeavoured to provide myself with nearly all the works which I require in my department, I rarely visit the Library with the view of consulting writers on divinity” (as cited in Neligan, 1995, p.14).
Bishop Furlong was an astute and discerning collector. His library contains approximately 1,349 antiquarian books, with items ranging in date from the 16th to the 19th century. It is a rich representation of Christian doctrinal and theological literature, containing works of ecclesiastical history, scripture, theology, philosophy, ethics and liturgy.
The collection includes many continental imprints and nearly 100 Irish imprints. Several of the books are first editions of sixteenth and seventeenth century works. The earliest item in the collection is dated 1540 (Concordantiae maiores sacrae Bibliae: summis uigilijs iam denuo ultra omnes editiones castigatae). Many items have ornate bindings and most feature the bookplate of the “House of Missions Enniscorthy”.

Manuscript fragment in printed book from the Furlong collection - Picture courtesy of Mick O Dwyer

The Furlong collection is of particular significance to one user group of the Russell Library – visitors from St John of God Healthcare, Australia. Bishop Furlong founded the Congregation of the Sisters of St John of God in 1871. As Ireland was still ravaged by the after-effects of an Gorta Mór, he established a base for the Sisters to minister to the poverty stricken people of Wexford. In 1895 eight Sisters immigrated to Australia at the request of Bishop Matthew Gibney of Perth, and used their skills to help the destitute residents of Western Australia. They opened hospitals in Western Australia, Victoria and New South Wales, and have been active there ever since. Every year a delegate from St John of God Healthcare make a pilgrimage to Ireland and visit the Russell Library to see the Furlong Collection.

Visitors from St John of God Health Care, Australia at the Russell Library - Picture courtesy of Mick O Dwyer

Following the closure of the House of Missions in Enniscorthy in 1993, the collection was relocated to the Russell Library.
The Furlong collection provides a unique window into the contents of a personal library of an Irish nineteenth-century theologian. It is held at the Russell Library, Maynooth University and can be viewed during normal opening hours (Mon, Weds & Thurs from 10am-1pm and 2pm-5pm).
With thanks to Barbara McCormack, Special Collections & Archives, Maynooth University for her assistance with this article.

Bibliography
Neligan, A. (Ed). (1995)The library: looking back, 1995-1800. In A. Neligan(Ed). Maynooth library treasures: from the collections of Saint Patrick’s College (p.14) Dublin. Royal Irish Academy

The Impact of Print Media and Wikipedia on Citation Rates of Academic Articles

Guest post by Daniel Price. Daniel lives in Israel, has an MA in Library and Information Science from Bar Ilan University, and works as a librarian at Shalem College in Jerusalem.

There is a clear desirability to publish a paper that has a strong scholarly impact, both for personal satisfaction knowing that one’s research has been viewed and built upon, and for professional reasons, since the number of citations a paper can correlate to promotion and tenure - the ubiquitous “publish or perish” (Miller, Taylor and Bedeian, 2011), which has now become an international phenomena (De Meis, Leopoldo, et al, 2003; De Rond and Miller, 2005; Min, Abdullah and Mohamed, 2013; Osuna, Cruz-Castro and Sanz-Menéndez, 2010; Qiu, 2010; Rotich and Muskali, 2013), increased salary and external funding (Browman and Stergiou, 2008; Diamond, 1986; Gomez-Mejia and Balkin, 1992; Monastersky, 2005; Schoonbaert and Roelants, 1996) and even the chance of winning professional prizes such as a Nobel Prize (Pendlebury, 2013).

Understandably then many studies have been carried out to discover the characteristics of highly cited papers (Aksnes, 2003) and the factors that influence citation counts. It is widely accepted that it is not just the quality of the science that affect the citation rate, but bibliometric parameters of papers such as its length (Abt, 1998; Ball, 2008; Falagas et. al. 2013; Hamrick, Fricker and Brown, 2010), number of references (Corbyn, 2010; Kostoff, 2007; Vieira and Gomes, 2010; Webster et. al., 2009), number of authors (Aksnes, 2003; Borsuk et. al., 2009; Gazni and Didegah, 2011; Wuchty et al., 2007), length of titles (Habibzadeh and Yadollahie, 2010; Jacques and Sebire, 2010), colons in titles (Jamali and Nikzad, 2011; van Wesel, Wyatt & ten Haa, 2014; Rostami, Mohammadpoorasl, and Hajizadeh, 2014).

A variety of external considerations is also known to influence the citation rate of academic papers. Intuitively a paper that has been publicised in the popular print media will be cited more as its publicity makes researchers more aware of it; however it can be argued that quality newspapers only cite valuable articles that would garner a significant number of citations in any case. That the first assumption was true was proven thirteen years ago in 1991 by comparing how many more citations articles published in the New England Journal of Medicine received if they were quoted in the New York Times during a 12 week period in 1978 when copies of the paper were printed but not distributed due to a strike compared to the following year of 1979. The results showed that articles covered by the Times received 72.8% more citations during the first year after their publication but only those discussed when the paper was actually distributed. Articles covered by the Times during the strike period received no more citations that articles not referenced by the Times, thus proving that exposure in the Times is a cause of citation (“the publicity hypothesis”) and not a forecast of future trends (the “earmark hypothesis”) (Phillips, 1991).

Phillips’ findings articles that covered in the New York Times receive more citations was confirmed in another study conducted 11 years later which also found however that exposure in less “elite” daily newspapers (but not in evening broadcasts of mainstream USA television networks) during a twelve month period from mid-1997 to mid-1998 also correlated with higher citation rates of a wider range of scientific papers, thus showing that scientific communication is not just carried out through elite channels. Importantly though, the author notes that his study does not prove the “publicity hypothesis” as the articles that were publicised could have been more intrinsically important and were only cited for this reason, although it does cast doubt on the “earmark hypothesis” since many articles that were not mentioned were cited (Kiernan, 2003).

In the present day much scholarly communication takes place on Web 2.0 tools and in the emerging field of “altmetrics” (Konkiel, 2013; Priem, 2014; Thelwall, 2013), studies focus on parametrics including whether it has been cited and discussed on academic blogs (Shema, Bar-Ilan and Thelwall 2014), tweeted (Eysenbach, 2011), and uploaded to a social media platform such as Mendley (Li and Thelwall, 2012).

Research has also investigated whether articles cited on the decidedly non-elitist Wikipedia. A study conducted in the beginning of 2010 found that 0.54% of approximately nineteen million Wikipedia pages cited a PubMed journal article, which corresponds to about 0.08% of all Pubmed articles. The researchers showed that journal articles that were cited in Wikipedia were cited more and had higher F1000 scores than a random subset of non-cited articles, a phenomenon they explained according to their hypothesised that Wikipedia users would only cite important articles that present novel and ground-breaking research (Evans and Krauthammer, 2011).

A larger study carried out two and half years later came to the same conclusion that academic papers in the field of computer science which are cited on Wikipedia would be more likely to be cited because the Wikipedia entries are written by talented authors who are careful to cite reputable authors and trending research topics (Shuai, Jiang, Liu and Bollen, 2013).

These conclusions support the “earmark hypothesis” that Phillips rejected and Kiernan doubted. Wikipedians are credited with identifying high impact journal articles soon after they are published and recommending them to other users.

In order to preserve a careful dialectic of both sides of the publicity/earmark hypotheses though, the possibility should be entertained that the large number of Wikipedia users may include researchers who, flooded with an information overload of thousands of articles, are motivated to read and quote certain articles because they saw them quoted on Wikipedia. Future research could investigate the information behavior of a large number of researchers, specifically their use of Wikipedia.

Bibliography:
Abt, H. A. (1998). Why some papers have long citation lifetimes. Nature, 395, 756-757.

Aksnes, D. W. (2003). Characteristics of highly cited papers. Research Evaluation, 12(3), 159-170.

Ale Ebrahim, N., Salehi, H., Embi, M. A., Habibi Tanha, F., Gholizadeh, H., Seyed Mohammad, M., & Ordi, A. (2013). Effective strategies for increasing citation frequency. International Education Studies, 6(11), 93-99.

Ball, P. (2008). A longer paper gathers more citations. Nature, 455(7211), 274-275.

Borsuk, R. M., Budden, A. E., Leimu, R., Aarssen, L. W., & Lortie, C. J. (2009). The influence of author gender, national language and number of authors on citation rate in ecology. Open Ecology Journal, 2, 25-28.

Browman, H. I., & Stergiou, K. I. (2008). Factors and indices are one thing, deciding who is scholarly, why they are scholarly, and the relative value of their scholarship is something else entirely. Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics, 8(1), 1-3.

Corbyn, Z. (2010). An easy way to boost a paper's citations. Nature. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/news.2010.406

Evans, P., & Krauthammer, M. (2011). Exploring the use of social media to measure journal article impact. In AMIA Annual Symposium Proceedings (Vol. 2011, p. 374). American Medical Informatics Association.‏

Eysenbach, G. (2011). Can tweets predict citations? Metrics of social impact based on twitter and correlation with traditional metrics of scientific impact. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 13(4).

Falagas, M. E., Zarkali, A., Karageorgopoulos, D. E., Bardakas, V., & Mavros, M. N. (2013). The impact of article length on the number of future citations: a bibliometric analysis of general medicine journals. PloS one, 8(2), e49476.

Gazni, A., & Didegah, F. (2011). Investigating different types of research collaboration and citation impact: a case study of Harvard University’s publications. Scientometrics, 87(2), 251-265.

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Price, D. (2014). A bibliographic study of articles published in twelve humanities journals. Available at https://www.academia.edu/7820799/A_Bibliographic_Study_of_Articles_Published_in_Twelve_Humanities_Journals

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Zine Librarianship and the infinite madness

Picture courtesy of Mick O Dwyer

Guest Post by Mick O’Dwyer who supports his zine habit by moonlighting as an Assistant Librarian in Maynooth University.

With zines, appearances are often deceiving. If you take one thing away from reading this blog post, remember that!

I am a zine librarian and librarian zinester. You are probably thinking something like, “What’s a zine”, or “aren’t they from the ‘80’s”? I will do my best to allay your fears.