The State of Open Access in Germany: An Analysis of the Publication Output of German Universities Neda Abediyarandi and Philipp Mayr [email protected]; [email protected] GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Cologne, Germany we matched all WoS publications of these 66 Introduction universities with UNPAYWALL publications. We Starting with the Berlin declaration in 2003, Open considered matching based on DOI and title to get Access (OA) publishing has established a new era precise results. We got round 34% matched of scholarly communication due to the unrestricted publications because a larger number of DOIs for electronic access to peer reviewed publications. OA publications in WoS was missing (especially offers a number of benefits like e.g. increased between 2000 and 2002). In the WoS dataset each citation counts (Gargouri et al., 2010) and enhanced publication can be affiliated with some authors. To visibility and accessibility of research output remove redundancy, we randomly allocated each (Tennant et al., 2016). The OA movement with its specific publication to one of its authors, in other powerful mandating and policymaking has been words, if a publication is written by several authors very successful in recent years. Relatively little is from different universities; we counted just for one known about the real effects of these activities in of them. In Table 1 we list the 10 German terms of OA publication output of institutions on a universities with the most matched WoS larger scale (Piwowar et al., 2018). The aim of this publications from 2000 to 2017. article is to investigate to what extent the OA Table 1. Total number of matched WoS fraction of the publication output of German publications by top 10 German universities universities has increased in the last years. To (2000-2017). answer this question, we analysed and compared total number of publications which have been Matched published by researchers of the largest German University WoS universities. We compared the numbers of OA articles versus closed publications for 66 large German Heidelberg Univ. 72,556 universities in the time span of 2000-2017. LMU Univ. 67,525 Methodology Charité Berlin Univ. 63,949 We follow the classic definitions and classify Technical Munich Univ 63,641 publications into three categories: Green OA, Gold OA and Closed. Closed access journals allow Bonn Univ. 54,671 papers to be read by users with a subscription to the Nuremberg Univ. 53,289 journal (Prosser, 2003). There are two major ways 51,266 for peer reviewed journal articles to OA, publishing Karlsruhe Univ. in pure OA journals (gold OA) or archiving of Hamburg Univ. 48,880 article copies or manuscripts at other web locations 47,574 (green OA) (Björk et al., 2014). Freiburg Univ. For the analysis we used Web of Science (WoS) Technical Dresden Univ. 47,137 1 and UNPAYWALL (Piwowar et al., 2018) to extract and analyse our data. To identify German Approach university affiliations in WoS, we used data from In the following, we are investigating the the Competence Centre for Bibliometrics, in percentage of publications of German universities particular the result of the project “Institutional published in gold, green and closed access. In order address disambiguation” (Rimmert et al., 2017). to answer this question, we analysed our extracted We first selected 66 German universities which data in two different aggregations. have more than 1,900 publications in WoS in a 1. Comparing the number of publications for the period of 17 years (2000-2017). In the following, top 10 German universities: We analysed and compared the total number of gold, green and 1 The UNPAYWALL dataset includes millions of closed access publications for the top 10 articles in which publications were separated based German universities (see Table 1 and Figure 1) on their access type (Green, Gold and Closed). in terms of matched WoS articles. https://unpaywall.org/ 1 2. Comparing groups of German universities: We rather than the others. Figure 2 shows the grouped 66 German universities into three percentage of gold and green access publications different groups based on total number of their for each group are significantly increasing in the published WoS publications from 2000 to last 7 years. 2017. Gold Green Closed The different groups of universities are the 100,0% 0,7% 1,0% 6,0% 5,6% 4,7% 14,5% following: 90,0% 16,2% 14,7% 24,2% 21,0% 27,7% Group 1: 22 German universities which have 80,0% 29,7% 33,2% published more than 31,000 publications (this 33,8% 70,0% 31,6% 30,3% 30,2% includes the top 10 universities from Table 1). 60,0% Group 2: 22 German universities which have 50,0% published more than 12,000 and less than 40,0% 78,1% 31,000 publications. 75,1% 72,3% 30,0% 60,2% 64,7% 62,1% Group 3: 22 German universities which have 52,2% 55,0% 55,3% published more than 1,900 and less than 12,000 20,0% publications. 10,0% We compared the total number of gold, green and 0,0% 2000 2010 2017 2000 2010 2017 2000 2010 2017 closed access publications which were published by Group 1 : Group 2 : Group 3 : each mentioned group in year 2000, 2010 and 2017 separately (see Figure 2). To verify our analysis, we Figure 2. Three groups of German univ. compared our data with the recent CWTS Leiden based on their total number of matched WoS Ranking from May 20192. We found a good match publications (2000, 2010, 2017). between our and the Leiden numbers for the German universities. Future Work As a next step, we plan to analyse the effects of Results concrete OA mandating in Germany and abroad on The total numbers of gold, green and closed access the number of green and gold OA publications, publications for top 10 German universities from their citation advantages and possible enhanced 2000 to 2017 are shown in Figure 1. Our findings research visibility. In the future, we plan to show that all top 10 German universities still tend compare the OA situation in Germany with other to publish most publications within the closed European countries and institutions all around the access model. If we compare with Figure 2, we see world. that the ratio of closed access publications is decreasing, but in the year 2017 still 50% and more Acknowledgement of the WoS articles are published in closed access. This work was supported by BMBF project OASE, grant number 01PU17005A. Gold Green Closed 100,0% 10,8% 9,3% 10,5% 8,6% 8,4% 7,7% 7,1% 10,1% 10,3% 8,5% 90,0% References 80,0% 26,7% Björk, B.-C., et al. (2014). Anatomy of green open 32,9% 32,5% 28,8% 38,9% 36,0% access. JASIST, 65(2), 237–250. 70,0% 39,5% 38,6% 37,1% 36,7% Gargouri, Y., et al. (2010). Self-Selected or 60,0% Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation 50,0% Impact for Higher Quality Research. PLoS 40,0% ONE, 5(10), e13636. 66,2% 30,0% 58,5% 59,8% 62,7% Piwowar, H., et al. (2018). The state of OA: a large- 49,7% 52,0% 52,4% 52,7% 53,9% 52,9% 20,0% scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of 10,0% Open Access articles. PeerJ, 6, e4375. 0,0% Prosser, D. C. (2003). From here to there: a proposed mechanism for transforming journals from closed to open access. Learned Publishing, 16(3), 163–166. Figure 1. Comparison of total number of Rimmert, C., Schwechheimer, H., & Winterhager, gold, green and closed access publications in M. (2017). Disambiguation of author addresses in bibliometric databases - technical report. the top 10 German universities (2000-2017). Tennant, J. P., et al. (2016). The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: We found that the top 10 German universities an evidence-based review. F1000Research, 5, published more gold/green access publications 632. 2 http://www.leidenranking.com/ 2 .