When will everything be Open Access?

OA continues to grow. But when will it be…done? When will everything be published as Open Access?

Using data from our recently-published PeerJ OA study, we took a crack at answering that question. This data we’re using comes from the Unpaywall database–now the largest open database of OA articles ever created, with comprehensive data on over 90 million articles. Check out the paper for more lots more details on how we assembled the data, along with assessments of accuracy and other goodies. But without further ado, here’s our projection of OA growth:

growth-over-time

In the study, we found that OA is increasingly likely for newer articles since around 1990. That’s the solid line part of the graph, and is based on hard data.

But since the curve is so regular, it was tempting to extend it so see what would happen at the current rate of increase. That’s the dotted line in the figure above. Of course it’s a pretty facile projection, in that no effort has been made to model the underlying processes. #limitations #futurework 😀. Moreover, the 2040 number is clearly too conservative since it doesn’t account for discontinuities–like the surge in OA we’ll see in 2020 when new European mandates take effect.

But while the dates can’t be known for certain, what the data makes very clear is that we are headed for an era of universal OA. It’s not a question of if, but when. And that’s great news.

Introducing oaDOI: resolve a DOI straight to OA

Most papers that are free-to-read are available thanks to “green OA” copies posted in institutional or subject repositories. The fact these copies are available for free is fantastic because anyone can read the research, but it does present a major challenge: given the DOI of a paper, how can we find the open version, given there are so many different repositories? screen-shot-2016-10-25-at-9-07-11-am

The obvious answer is “Google Scholar” 🙂 And yup, that works great, and given the resources of Google will probably always be the most comprehensive solution. But Google’s interface requires an extra search step, and its data isn’t open for others to build tools on top of.

We made a thing to fix that. Introducing oaDOI:

DOI gets you a paywall page: doi.org/10.1038/ng.3260
oaDOI gets you a PDF: oadoi.org/10.1038/ng.3260

We look for open copies of articles using the following data sources:

The Directory of Open Access Journals to see if it’s in their index of OA journals.
CrossRef’s license metadata field, to see if the publisher has reported an open license.
Our own custom list DOI prefixes, to see if it’s in a known preprint repository.
DataCite, to see if it’s an open dataset.
The wonderful BASE OA search engine to see if there’s a Green OA copy of the article. BASE indexes 90mil+ open documents in 4000+ repositories by harvesting OAI-PMH metadata.
Repository pages directly, in cases where BASE was unable to determine openness.
Journal article pages directly, to see if there’s a free PDF link (this is great for detecting hybrid OA)

oaDOI was inspired by the really cool DOAI. oaDOI is a wrapper around the OA detection used by Impactstory. It’s open source of course, can be used as a lookup engine in Zotero, and has an easy and powerful API that returns license data and other good stuff.

Check it out at oadoi.org, let us know what you think (@oadoi_org), and help us spread the word!

What’s your #OAscore?

We’re all obsessed with self-measurement.

We measure how much we’re Liked online. We measure how many steps we take in a day. And as academics, we measure our success using publication counts, h-indices, and even Impact Factors.

But we’re missing something.

As academics, our fundamental job is not to amass citations, but to increase the collective wisdom of our species. It’s an important job. Maybe even a sacred one. It matters. And it’s one we profoundly fail at when we lock our work behind paywalls.

Given this, there’s a measurement that must outweigh all the others we use (and misuse) as researchers: how much of our work can be read?

This Open Access Week, we’re rolling out this measurement on Impactstory. It’s a simple number: what percentage of your work is free to read online? We’d argue that it’s perhaps the most important number associated with your professional life (unless maybe it’s the percentage of your work published with a robust license that allows reuse beyond reading…we’re calculating that too). We’re calling it your Open Access Score.

We’d like to issue a challenge to every researcher: find out your open access score, do one thing to raise it, and tell someone you did. It takes ten minutes, and it’s a concrete thing you can do to be proud of yourself as a scholar.

Here’s how to do it:

Make an Impactstory profile. You’ll need a Twitter account and nothing more…it’s free, nonprofit, and takes less than five minutes. Plus along the way you’ll learn cool stuff about how often your research has been tweeted, blogged, and discussed online.
Deposit just one of your papers into an Open Access repository. Again: it’s easy. Here’s instructions.
Once you’re done, update your Impactstory, and see your improved score.
Tweet it. Let your community know you’ve made the world a richer, more beautiful place because you’ve made you’ve increased the knowledge available to humanity. Just like that. Let’s spread that idea.

Measurement is controversial. It has pros and cons. But when you’re measuring the right things, it can be incredibly powerful. This OA Week, join us in measuring the right things. Find your #OAscore, make it better, tweet it out. If we’re going to measure steps, let’s make them steps that matter.

Crossposted on the Open Access Week blog.

Now, a better way to find and reward open access

There’s always been a wonderful connection between altmetrics and open science.

Altmetrics have helped to demonstrate the impact of open access publication. And since the beginning, altmetrics have excited and provoked ideas for new, open, and revolutionary science communication systems. In fact, the two communities have overlapped so much that altmetrics has been called a “school” of open science.

We’ve always seen it that way at Impactstory. We’re uninterested in bean-counting. We are interested in setting the stage for a second scientific revolution, one that will happen when two open networks intersect: a network of instantly-available diverse research products and a network of comprehensive, open, distributed significance indicators.

So along with promoting altmetrics, we’ve also been big on incentives for open access. And today we’re excited that we got a lot better at it.

We’re launching a new Open Access badge, backed by a really accurate new system for automatically detecting fulltext for online resources. It finds not just Gold OA, but also self-archived Green OA, hybrid OA, and born-open products like research datasets.

A lot of other projects have worked on this sticky problem before us, including the Open Article Gauge, OACensus, Dissemin, and the Open Access Button. Admirably, these have all been open-source projects, so we’ve been able to reuse lots of their great ideas.

Then we’ve added oodles of our own ideas and techniques, along with plenty of research and testing. The result? Impactstory is now the best, most accurate way to automatically assess openness of publications. We’re proud of that.

And we know this is just the beginning! Fork our code or send us a pull request if you want to make this even better. Here’s a list of where we check for OA to get you started:

The Directory of Open Access Journals to see if it’s in their index of OA journals,
CrossRef’s license metadata field, to see if the publisher has uploaded an open license.
Our own custom list DOI prefixes, to see if it’s in a known preprint repo
DataCite, to see if it’s an open dataset.
The wonderful BASE OA search engine to see if there’s a Green OA copy of the article.
Repository pages directly, in cases where BASE was unable to determine openness.
Journal article pages directly, to see if there’s a free PDF link (this is great for detecting hybrid OA)

What’s it mean for you? Well, Impactstory is now a powerful tool for spreading the word about open access. We’ve found that seeing that openness badge–or OH NOES lack of a badge!–on their new profile is powerful for a researcher who might otherwise not think much about OA.

So, if you care about OA: challenge your colleagues to go make a free profile and see how open they really are. Or you can use our API to learn about the openness of groups of scholars (great for librarians, or for a presentation to your department). Just hit the endpoint http://impactstory.org/u/someones_orcid_id to find out the openness stats for anyone.

Hit us up with any thoughts or comments, and enjoy!

Bringing article fulltext to your Impactstory profile

Your work’s impact helps define your identity as a scientist; that’s why we’re so excited about being the world’s most complete impact profile. But of course the content of your work is a key part of your identity, too.

This week, we’re launching a feature that’ll bring that content to your Impactstory profile: if there’s a free fulltext version of one of your articles, we’ll find it and automatically link to it from your profile.

We’ll be automatically checking tons of places to find where an article’s freely available:

Is the article in PMC?
Is it published in a journal listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals?
Is it published in a journal considered “open access” by Mendeley?
Does PubMed LinkOut to a free and full-text resource version?
If it’s in none of these, is it in our custom-built list of other open sources (including arXiv, figshare, and others)?

Of course, even with all these checks, we’re going to miss some sources–especially self-archiving in institutional repositories. So we’ll be improving our list over time, and you’ll be able to easily add your own linkouts when we miss them.

We’re excited to pull all this together; it’s another big step toward making your Impactstory profile a great place to share your scholarly identity online. Look for the release in a few days!

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