The Charité Medical Library presents data about open access publishing in journal articles at the Charité in interactive, clickable diagrams. This dashboard is complementary to the Charité Metrics Dashboard from the BIH QUEST Center at Charité.
Percentage of open access among all articles involving Charité authors
Open access status among articles involving Charité authors and among articles with a Charité corresponding author
Publishers and journals among articles involving Charité authors, by open access status
Open licenses under which articles involving Charité authors were published
Chosen data sources include information about corresponding authors and their affiliations. Corresponding authors are of special interest here because they are responsible for paying fees associated with gold and hybrid Open Access (OA) publishing. Such data is used in cost estimates for the Charité. However, any author can self-archive a paper (green open access) and thus the total number of papers with a Charité authorship is significant when measuring the percentage of open access reached by the institution as a whole. While the percentage of OA publishing is a key indicator for the visibility and discoverability of research findings, the quality and costs of open access must also be monitored, hence the selection of analyses presented in this dashboard.
Data collection is time consuming and thus happens annually. Metadata describing articles from Web of Science, EMBASE and from the Charité Medical Library (including our Publication Fund) are combined and deduplicated largely by DOI-matching but also involving manual checks especially where DOIs are missing from the data. Articles without a DOI are deduplicated using the PMID, WOS Accession Number and Embase Accession Number, if applicable. Those deduplications are undertaken firstly within each raw data set (2016–2017, 2018–2020, 2021), secondly between these data sets, always preferring records from previous years over newer records.
Dashboard data forms the basis of predictions for future open access costs for the Charité.
Since open access status changes and in particular green OA is often delayed, data on the OA-status for 2021 articles and beyond is captured as a snapshot at the time of the Unpaywall lookup. However, in the dashboard for the years 2016 – 2017 and 2018 – 2020 we can see the snapshot across all years at the time of Unpaywall lookups in 2021.
The analysis “Publishers and journals among articles involving Charité authors, by open access status” shows the most recent publisher and journal choices of Charité authors from 2020 and looks at centrally financed OA-costs over the last five years: the blue chart is clickable to show costs by publisher or by year, showing the steep rise in central costs since the launch of the Publication Fund in 2018 and introduction of DEAL with Wiley in 2019 and SpringerNature in 2020. Actual and complete costs for the institution are likely to be much higher than reported here, since data is currently only available for centrally financed articles. Efforts are being made to complete the picture.
The last analysis looks at the use of open licenses in specific years, according to the open access status of an article.
Unpaywall is used to ascertain the open access status of articles via DOI. For the 2021 articles, data was requested via the Unpaywall REST API with full metadata records. The OA-status in the dashboard differs slightly from the status as delivered by Unpaywall. Our goal is to find the most open versions of articles, while Unpaywall is focused on giving readers access to OA versions. Articles which Unpaywall identifies as “Bronze OA” but which have a copy in a repository documented in the Unpaywall metadata are given the status “Green OA” in this dashboard. Definitions for the OA-Status of articles are:
This is included as a status for the sake of completeness but does not fit the definition of open access from the Berlin Declaration, which the Charité is a signatory of. There are two reasons why bronze is not true open access:
Similarly, as shown in the last analysis, most green open access publishing also happens without a clearly identifiable license but at least free access is granted for the long term.
These are determined using data from Unpaywall. Articles may be available under more than one license but a hierarchy of licenses is used, so that only the least restrictive, and most open licenses are counted in the analysis in this dashboard.