Speakers
Mr
David BallMr
Lars BJØRNSHAUGEMr
Mikael K. Elbaek
Description
Mikael K. Elbæk : Open Access Barometer to Open Access Indicator: lessons learned from the journey from idea, to a prototype to become instrumental for the Danish Open Access strategy.
Monitoring a phenomenon has two remarkable effects; first it enables us to understand its properties and interact with the object or phenomenon in an informed way. The second effect (an interesting fact about social phenomenon such as publishing), is that when something is being monitored it tends to stimulate that which is being monitored. It was these facts that were the primary motivation for the Open Access Barometer – a pilot project funded by DEFF in 2013-2014. Firstly we simply didn’t know how much of the research coming out of Denmark were Open Access. Secondly we wanted to stimulate the growth of Open Access. The Danish Open Access Barometer project published a mapping of Open Access to Danish research articles and produced a prototype of a web-based Open Access barometer that through data harvest from all Danish universities could monitor the current state of Open Access (gold, green) daily and produce a number of interesting statistics including an Open Access-potential based on SHERPA/RoMEO data. In conclusion the project made a number of recommendations to monitoring Open Access and it was the hope that policy makers working with Open Access implementation would take up the idea of measuring Open Access – but we did not expect it.
However, in June 2014 the Danish Minister of Higher Education and Science announced the Danish strategy for Open Access – with two remarkable goals of 80% Open Access in 2017 to publications published in 2016 and topping this by 2022 where the goal is that all (100%) publications published in 2021 should be Open Access. In order to achieve these ambitious goals a high-profile steering committee was put together. One of the key focus areas are: “The implementation of Open Access is to be monitored on an ongoing basis to ensure that all parties make a maximum effort to develop and disseminate free accessibility to Danish research findings”. To specify and ultimately measure Open Access a working group was set-up – that in its mandate was to build on the outcomes and experiences of the former DEFF project The Danish Open Access Barometer. By January 2015 this group produced a specification, price estimate and production plan for this Open Access monitor. The name was changed to Open Access indicator and will measure Open Access to Danish research from January 2016.
The presenter of this contribution was project manager of the Danish Open Access Barometer and member of the Open Access indicator working group set-up by the Ministry of Higher Education and Science.
Based on the Mikael K. Elbæk’s experience from this work the presentation will take you through:
• Definitions – what to measures, when to measure - an imperfect compromise
o Definitions are incredible important as they will form the way institutions will respond and in the end how they will organize their work
• Analysis and visualisation – what kinds of statistics was decided to make public
o In the first version and what kinds of statistics was found nice-to-have and postponed to a second version that may be initially specified in 2016
• Pros and cons of moving from an informal Open Access Barometer to an formal Open Access indicator that will be instrumental in the implementation of a national Open Access strategy
o What can be done to overcome the bureaucracy and the imperfect compromise – will making all data openly available be a solution.
• Perspectives on how can we establish a common framework across nation that enables us to monitor Open Access, compare and aggregate data.
o There have been bibliometric studies, based on proposed statistical significant data, which suggest that Open Access levels are much higher then what can be measured with more domain knowledge and rigorous effort.
o A discussion of what can be done to have a better basis for comparing nations Open Access-levels?
