Open Access Archivangelism

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SUMMARY: Re: Deblauwe, F. (2008) OA Academia in Repose: Seven Academic Open-Access Repositories Compared: A useful way to benchmark OA progress would be to focus on OA's target content -- peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly journal articles -- and to indicate, year by year, the proportion of the total annual output of the content-providers, rather than just absolute annual deposit totals. The OA content-providers are universities and research institutions. The denominator for all measures should be the number of articles the institution publishes in a given year, and the numerator should be the number of articles published in that year (full-texts) that are deposited in that institution's Institutional Repository (IR). (If an institution does not know its own annual published articles output -- as is likely, since such record-keeping is one of the many functions that the OA IRs are meant to perform -- an estimate can be derived from the Institute of Scientific Information's (ISI's) annual data for that institution.)

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Deblauwe, Francis (2008) OA Academia in Repose: Seven Academic Open-Access Repositories Compared

This is a useful beginning in the analysis of the growth of Open Access (OA), but it is mostly based on central collections of a variety of different kinds of content.

A useful way to benchmark OA progress would be to focus on OA's target content -- this would be, first and foremost, peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly journal articles -- and to indicate, year by year, the proportion of the total annual output of the content-providers, rather than just absolute annual deposit totals.

The OA content-providers are universities and research institutions. The denominator for all measures should be the number of articles the institution publishes in a given year, and the numerator should be the number of articles published in that year (full-texts) that are deposited in that institution's Institutional Repository (IR).

Just counting total deposits, without specifying the year of publication, the year of deposit, and the total target output of which they are a fraction (as well as making sure they are article full-texts rather than just metadata) is only minimally informative.

Absolute totals for Central Repositories (CRs), based on open-ended input from distributed institutions, are even less informative, as there is no indication of the size of the total output, hence what fraction of that has been deposited.

If an institution does not know its own annual published articles output -- as is likely, since such record-keeping is one of the many functions that the OA IRs are meant to perform -- an estimate can be derived from the Institute of Scientific Information's (ISI's) annual data for that institution. The estimate is then simple: Determine what proportion of the full-texts of the annual ISI items for that institution are in the IR. (ISI does not index everything, but it probably indexes the most important output, and this ratio is hence an estimate of what proportion of the most important output is being made OA annually by that institution).

This calculation could easily be done for the only university IR among the 7 analyzed above, Cambridge University's. It was probably chosen because it is the IR containing the largest total number of items (see ROAR) and one of the few IRs with a total item count big enough to be comparable with the total counts of the multi-institutional collections such as Arxiv. However, it is unclear what proportion of the items in Cambridge's IR are the full-texts of journal articles -- and what percentage of Cambridge's annual journal article output this represents.

CERN is an institution, but not a multidisciplinary university: High Energy Physics only. CERN has, however, done the recommended estimate of its annual OA growth in 2006 and found its IR "Three Quarters Full and Counting. http://library.cern.ch/HEPLW/12/papers/2/
CERN, moreover, is one of the 25 institutions, universities and departments that have mandated deposit in their IR. Those are also the IRs that are growing the fastest.

(Deblauwe notes that"Resources... remain a big issue, e.g., in 2006, after the initially-funded three years, DSpace@Cambridge's growth rate slowed down due to underestimation of the expenses and difficulty of scaling up." I would suggest that what Cambridge needs is not more resources for the IR but a deposit mandate, like Southampton's, QUT's, Minho's, CERN's, Harvard's, Stanford's, and the rest of the 25 mandates to date: See ROARMAP.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum