Combining different data monitors for more intentional policymaking: the case of Open Access at Utrecht University

Abstract

Over the past two decades, scholarly publishing has made a large shift towards Open Access, where research publications are made freely available to all rather than put behind paywalls to be bought back by university libraries. Large funding bodies such as NWO and ERC now require all output of funded research projects to be OA, and many universities in the Netherlands and Europe have formulated similarly ambitious goals. For researchers, this has led to new and additional considerations when it comes to deciding where to submit their research: traditional impact-based measures of journal quality now have to be weighed against the availability (and affordability) of OA options. For libraries and faculties, it means navigating the many ways of financing OA, which differ between journals and publishers. This requires balancing questions of academic values such as scientific quality and equity with an understandable desire for maximal financial efficiency. Of course, researcher choices and library (financial) policies feed into each other. One factor complicating this feedback loop is that neither side is completely transparent to the other. On the one hand, many OA-related costs are invisible to the researcher (for instance, the money spent by library consortia on discount deals with publishers). On the other, publication data such as obtained from a CRIS does not include any details on how these publications were financed, making it hard to see to which extent financial considerations influenced the researchers' choice of publication venue. As a result of these factors and more, it is difficult for libraries and the research communities they support to gain insight into the true cost of Open Access, and, accordingly, the extent to which 100% OA is attainable at a particular institution. In this presentation, we show how a more complete and insightful picture of Open Access publishing practices and costs may be obtained by combining data from different sources, particularly financial monitoring, CRIS publication data, and library consortia discount data. Based on two recent case studies, we show how the new insights gained in this way are being used to underpin and finetune Open Access policies at Utrecht University. The presentation will be particularly relevant to staff of research libraries with an interest in academic publishing. However, we are aiming to keep it mostly jargon-free and accessible to anyone who would like to be inspired to use their existing data monitors in more creative ways. Case study 1: 'APCs in the wild' - Each year the library identifies invoices regarding publication costs in the university invoice management system (SAP) and records the corresponding publication data. Combined with other data this enables us to connect the university output to money streams in different ways. This project has led to more insight in the 'unofficial' ways researchers fund their OA articles and the largely unmonitored money streams this involves. There is potentially a lot to gain in terms of financial efficiency by centralizing these costs. Case study 2: OA analysis at the Faculty of Science - By combining publication data from CRIS with OA status from Unpaywall it was possible to map the OA status at the UU Faculty of Science. A dive into this publication data, with SCOPUS data, allowed us to differentiate between corresponding authors affiliated with UU and not. This approach showed that UU corresponding authors are publishing 23 % more Hybrid-Gold Open Access than non-UU authors. These findings combined with data on payment ('APCs in the wild') suggest that OA is the preferred route when financial support is available. A presentation at the "Demystifying Statistics and Evaluation in Libraries" Satellite Meeting, organised by the Statistics and Evaluation Section and held at the University of Utrecht in Utrecht, The Netherlands from 17–18 August 2023.