Background

The researchers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) often express concerns about funding for Open Access (OA) publishing. As part of a broader effort to investigate more sustainable avenues of support for OA fees, the UMB Health Sciences and Human Services 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 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.

We focused on optimizing the process of updating the dashboard 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. We plan to incorporate data on publishing costs next year.

Conclusions

Our dashboard shows that nearly two-thirds of UMB’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.