This year Te Pōkai Tara Universities New Zealand released a Pan-university Statement on Open Access. The statement included a goal to:
Increase open access across our university repositories from 48% of published research (current) to 70% by 2025. This is possible if all eight universities deposit all eligible manuscripts into their repositories.
On Friday 8 September I facilitated a discussion among colleagues from other university libraries, many of whom manage our repositories. We had a couple of people from Crown Research Institutes too. I asked the group: what exactly does this target mean? How do we assess it?
As a first step, we worked together using the wonderful OpenAlex tool to create some league tables as a means of friendly competition.
First of all, if we look at all works in OpenAlex (about 20 years’ worth), what proportion of them are open?
| ALL TIME (i.e. 2000-2023) | % |
| Auckland | 41 |
| AUT | 37 |
| Landcare | 36 |
| AgResearch | 36 |
| Otago | 36 |
| Waikato | 34 |
| Lincoln | 33 |
| Canterbury | 32 |
| VUW | 30 |
| Massey | 30 |
All the proportions here are low, which is to be expected as generally speaking the amont of open access publications has increased markedly in the last 5-10 years.
If we look at the rates over the most-recent three years, we get a much different picture:
| Three-year period 2020-22 | % |
| AgResearch | 64 |
| Landcare | 58 |
| Otago | 55 |
| Canterbury | 55 |
| Massey | 52 |
| VUW | 51 |
| Auckland | 51 |
| Waikato | 50 |
| AUT | 50 |
| Lincoln | 49 |
Interestingly, the CRIs are taking the lead here. The universities have a fairly tight grouping around and just over half of our work being open.
What about the most recent whole year, 2022?
| 2022 (most recent full year) | % |
| AgResearch | 69 |
| Landcare | 63 |
| Otago | 59 |
| Canterbury | 57 |
| Massey | 57 |
| AUT | 56 |
| Lincoln | 55 |
| VUW | 53 |
| Auckland | 53 |
| Waikato | 52 |
The CRIs remain out in front. For the universities, 2022 is the first year we would see some impact from Read and Publish deals and we do see the 2022 openness is higher than the three-year figures from the previous table. (Digging deeper into the OpenAlex data we can see the number of “Hybrid” publications has increased markedly in 2022 and 2023, a topic for another post perhaps.)
Finally, what about a running total for 2023, as things stand in September?
| 2023 (running total) | % |
| AgResearch | 69 |
| Landcare | 66 |
| Otago | 62 |
| Canterbury | 62 |
| Lincoln | 60 |
| Massey | 59 |
| AUT | 58 |
| VUW | 55 |
| Auckland | 54 |
| Waikato | 51 |
The trend is very clearly upwards, with the CRIs nearing 70% and the highest univerities topping 60% now.
All these tables are to suggest that there are different ways of assessing the proportion of open — and that when we check makes a difference. It is clear that the proportion is increasing year-by-year.
After creating these “league tables”, the group dicussed a range of things, including:
- There is no “right” way to assess our proportion of open. So it may be that we could use a range of measures, as per the different tables here.
- Embargo periods: one year is the most common, and after two years 90% of journal articles will have passed their embargo period (with the remaining 10% almost exclusively with one publisher). It might be reasonable to assume any accepted manuscripts of closed articles more than two years old could be deposited in an institutional repository without having to determine embargo periods for each and every artilce (excluding that one publisher).
- The data we are talking about here only includes publications with a DOI. For some institutions a lot of research does not have a DOI. This is a limitation of this kind of assessment. But it’s clear we should place this caveat on all these measurements.