Background

The researchers at our public health sciences university often express their concerns about funding for Open Access (OA) publishing. The library currently has a limited OA publishing fund for students and junior faculty, but it is not able to serve the whole campus community and often runs out of funds before the end of each fiscal year. As part of a broader effort to investigate more effective and sustainable avenues of support for OA fees, the library’s Scholarly Communications Committee undertook a project to track the university’s OA publications through an interactive dashboard. We plan to use this dashboard to inform decisions about potential OA publishing agreements and assess their impact.

Description

Our goal was to create an accessible and sustainable product that could be shared with and customized for multiple campus stakeholders. To achieve this, publication data across the entire university was exported from Scopus and imported to Microsoft's Power BI, where we created an interactive dashboard that visualizes publishing trends by OA model, publisher, journal, year, and school for the last five years. Considering that committee membership changes annually, we focused on optimizing the process of updating the dashboard with new data and automating steps where possible. The dashboard design required several iterations and will continue to be refined over time as we gain insight into the questions about OA publishing that are of importance to our community.

Library leadership responded positively to the dashboard, and our next step is to roll the dashboard out to campus and incorporate additional feedback. In the near future, we will conduct a survey of our institution’s researchers to get a better sense of the funding sources available to them for OA publishing and how this impacts their publishing decisions. We also plan to evaluate the dashboard’s success through this survey as well as through usage statistics.

Conclusions

Our dashboard shows that nearly two-thirds of our institution’s publications from the past five years (that are indexed in Scopus) are OA. Of those, 42% are Gold OA (28% of total publications). We can also see from our dashboard that OA publications have a higher average citation count than non-OA.

Ultimately, we will integrate the publication data with survey results, data from our current OA publishing fund, and potentially other relevant data sources as applicable and available to help inform and evaluate our OA publishing initiatives. We know that many health sciences libraries are interested in supporting OA publishing, and we hope to provide a well-documented process for visualizing these trends that could be easily adapted by others.