open access - four or five shades of openness: a taxonomy of open access - dr john paull

Four or Five Shades of

Openness: A Taxonomy of

Open Access

Dr John Paull

School of Geography & Environmental Studies

University of Tasmania

j.paull@utas.edu.au

Open UTAS to the World

Teaching Matters 2013 28-29 November

University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia

★ ★★ ★

Equality

“All animals are equal

but some animals are

more equal than others”

(George Orwell, 1945, p.118).

image: www.adamdcosta.blogspot.com.au/2011/05/animal-farm.html

Openness

“Of all the journals that are open,

some journals are more open than

others” (after Orwell).

image: J Paull

image: www.w3.org

• free• open• non proprietary

Ptolemy

• c.200 BC

• Library of Alexandria

• all the knowledge of the world

image: O von Corven, Wikimedia Commons

Closedness

• $ to read or subscribe

• $0 to author

• © forfeited

• ? permission to distribute

image: J Paull

4 indices* of Openness

1. “there is no barrier to access for the reader”?

2. “it is free to the author/s”?

3. “copyright is retained by the author/s”?

4. “the paper can be freely distributed under licence”?

Paull, 2013 *from editor queries & journal FAQs

www.doaj.org

Sample of 200

Methodology• Population, N≈10,000 (www.doaj.org)

• Sample, n=200

• Sample, stratified random sample (www.random.org)

• English language journals

• Each journal rated, (Ji1, Ji2, Ji3, Ji4) where i=1-200 and

Jij = 0 or 1

★Index 1

“there is no barrier to access for the reader”

★

★

★Index 2

“it is free to the author/s”

★

★Index 3

“copyright is retained by the author/s”

★

★Index 4

“the paper can be freely distributed under licence”

image: creativecommons.org/licenses

Four or five shades of OpennessStar ratings

(n=200 DOAJ journals)

Pyramid of Openness

23%★★★★

66% ★★★+

96% ★★+

100% ★+

100% Open

23%★★★★

66% ★★★+

96% ★★+

100% ★+

100% Open

Room for improvement

VerdictThis rating system is workable

This rating system readily generates a rating of Openness for any journal

100% of DOAJ journals are open access

For each of the 4 tests, a majority of OA journals pass

Room for improvement for OA journals

77% of OA journals can do better

23% of OA journals rate ★★★★

Open UTAS to the World

Thank you

Open UTAS to the World

Four or Five Shades of Openness: A Taxonomy of Open AccessDr John Paull

School of Geography & Environmental Studies

University of Tasmania

j.paull@utas.edu.au

Abstract

At Manor Farm it was a case of: “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others” (Orwell, 1945,

p.118). The World Wide Web has enabled the proliferation of open access (OA) publishing and there are now more than

10,000 OA academic journals (DOAJ, 2013). They are not, however, equally open, and indeed some OA journals are

‘more open than others’. Four indices of openness have been proposed as a basis for rating OA journals for openness,

viz.: “there is no barrier to access for the reader”; “it is free to the author/s”; “copyright is retained by the author/s”; and,

“the paper can be freely distributed under licence” (Paull, 2013, p.3). In this paper a stratified random sample of OA

journals (n=200) is evaluated. For each journal, each index was rated as meeting (i=1 ) or not meeting (i=0) each index

criterion. This rating system generates an n-tuple for each OA journal (J1-200(i1, i2, i3, i4) where each index, (i1, i2, i3, i4), takes

the value ‘1’ or ‘0’. Adding the index values, (i1 + i2 + i3 + i4 ), for each journal generates, for each journal, an openness rating

(OR) of from 0 to 4 (according to how many indices were scored in the affirmative) and thus five potential shades of

openness, which are here characterized as ‘star ratings’. As with other star-rating systems (e.g. hotel accommodation)

aggregating index scores is a lossy system and generates a taxonomic classification system with a claim of comparability

(rather than equality) within each classification band. The results were that 97.5% of OA journals placed no impediment in

the way of access for readers (including no requirement to register-to-read nor to accept cookies); 62.5% charged no fee

to the author/s (fees ranged from £24 to US$2135); 55.5% of OA journals left the copyright with the author/s; and 67.5%

declared a free-to-distribute licence (most usually CC-BY and its variations). Of the sample, no OA journal scored just zero

for its openness rating, 6% of OA journals rated a single star, 28% rated as 2 stars, 43% rated 3-stars, and 23% of OA

journals rated as 4-stars for openness. If it is accepted that meeting the four criteria is desirable and/or best practice then

the results reveal plenty of room for improvement in the practice of OA journal publishing.

References

DOAJ. (2013). Directory of Open Access Journals: http://www.doaj.org/ Orwell, G. (1945). Animal Farm (1990 edition).

London: Harcourt Brace & Company.Paull, J. (2013). Open Access Publishing: What is world’s best practice? Journal of

Organic Systems, 8(1), 2-4. http://philpapers.org/archive/PAUOAP