Anne Hobert’s research while affiliated with University of Göttingen and other places

This article is the second part of the investigation of the determinants for the uptake of Open Access (OA). While the first part focusses on journal-based OA (hybrid and full OA) (Taubert et al. in Scientometrics 128(6):3601-3625, 2023), the article at hand investigates the determinants for the uptake of institutional and subject repository OA in the university landscape of Germany. Both articles consider three types of factors: the disciplinary profile of universities, their OA infrastructures and services and large transformative agreements The article also apply a conjoint methodological design: the uptake of OA as well as the determinants are measured by combining several data sources (incl. Web of Science, Unpaywall, an authority file of standardised German affiliation information, the ISSN-Gold-OA 4.0 list, and lists of publications covered by transformative agreements). For universities' OA infrastructures and services, a structured data collection was created by harvesting different sources of information and by manual online search. To determine the explanatory power of the different factors, a series of regression analyses was performed for different periods and for both institutional as well as subject repository OA. Given that both articles derive from the same project, there is a thematical overlap in the methods and data section. As a result of the regression analyses, the most determining factor for the explanation of differences in the uptake of both repository OA-types turned out to be the disciplinary profile, whereas all variables that capture local infrastructural support and services for OA turned out to be non-significant. The outcome of the regression analyses is contextualised by an interview study conducted with 20 OA officers of German universities. The contextualisation provides hints that the original function of institutional repositories , offering a channel for secondary publishing is vanishing, while a new function of aggregation of metadata and full texts is becoming of increasing importance.

This study investigates the determinants for the uptake of institutional and subject repository Open Access (OA) in the university landscape of Germany and considers three factors: The disciplinary profile of universities, their OA infrastructures and services and large transformative agreements. The uptake of OA as well as the determinants are measured by combining several data sources (incl. Web of Science, Unpaywall, an authority file of standardised German affiliation information, the ISSN-Gold-OA 4.0 list, and lists of publications covered by transformative agreements). For universities' OA infrastructures and services, a structured data collection was created by harvesting different sources of information and by manual online search. To determine the explanatory power of the different factors, a series of regression analyses was performed for different periods and for both institutional as well as subject repository OA. As a result of the regression analyses, the most determining factor for the explanation of differences in the uptake of both repository OA-types turned out to be the disciplinary profile, whereas all variables that capture local infrastructural support and services for OA turned out to be non-significant. The outcome of the regression analyses is contextualised by an interview study conducted with 20 OA officers of German universities. The contextualisation provides hints that the original function of institutional repositories, offering a channel for secondary publishing is vanishing, while a new function of aggregation of metadata and full texts is becoming of increasing importance.

This study investigates the determinants for the uptake of Full and Hybrid Open Access (OA) in the university landscape of Germany and distinguishes between three factors: The disciplinary profile, infrastructures and services of universities that aim to support OA, and large transformative agreements. The uptake of OA, the influence of the disciplinary profile of universities and the influence of transformative agreements is measured by combining several data sources (incl. Web of Science, Unpaywall, an authority file of standardised German affiliation information, the ISSN-Gold-OA 4.0 list, and lists of publications covered by transformative agreements). For infrastructures and services that support OA , a structured data collection was created by harvesting different sources of information and by manual online search. To determine the explanatory power of the different factors, a series of regression analyses was performed for different periods and for both Full as well as Hybrid OA. As a result of the regression analyses, the most determining factor for the explanation of differences in the uptake of both OA-types turned out to be the disciplinary profile. For the year 2020, Hybrid OA transformative agreements have become a second relevant factor. However, all variables that reflect local infrastructural support and services for OA turned out to be non-significant. To deepen the understanding of the adoption of OA on the level of institutions, the outcomes of the regression analyses are contextualised by an interview study conducted with 20 OA officers of German universities.

In 2014, a union of German research organisations established Projekt DEAL, a national-level project to negotiate licensing agreements with large scientific publishers. Negotiations between DEAL and Elsevier began in 2016, and broke down without a successful agreement in 2018; in this time, around 200 German research institutions cancelled their license agreements with Elsevier, leading Elsevier to restrict journal access at those institutions. We investigated the effect on researchers’ publishing and citing behaviours from a bibliometric perspective, using a dataset of ∼400,000 articles published by researchers at DEAL institutions between 2012–2020. We further investigated these effects with respect to the timing of contract cancellations, research disciplines, collaboration patterns, and article open-access status. We find evidence for a decrease in Elsevier’s market share of articles from DEAL institutions, with the largest year-on-year market share decreases occuring from 2018 to 2020 following the implementation of access restrictions. We also observe year-on-year decreases in the proportion of citations, although the decrease is smaller. We conclude that negotiations with Elsevier and access restrictions have led to some reduced willingness to publish in Elsevier journals, but that researchers are not strongly affected in their ability to cite Elsevier articles, implying that researchers use other methods to access scientific literature. Peer Review https://www.webofscience.com/api/gateway/wos/peer-review/10.1162/qss_a_00255

This study investigates the determinants for the uptake of Full and Hybrid Open Access (OA) in the university landscape of Germany. It adapts the governance equaliser as a heuristic for this purpose and distinguishes between three factors: The disciplinary profile (academic self-governance), infrastructures and services of universities that aim to support OA (managerial self-governance) and large transformative agreements (part of state regulation). The uptake of OA, the influence of the disciplinary profile of universities and the influence of transformative agreements is measured by combining several data sources (incl. Web of Science, Unpaywall, an authority file of standardised German affiliation information, the ISSN-Gold-OA 4.0 list, and lists of publications covered by transformative agreements). For managerial self-governance, a structured data collection was created by harvesting different sources of information and by manual online search. To determine the explanatory power of the different factors, a series of regression analyses was performed for different periods and for both Full as well as Hybrid OA. As a result of the regression analyses, the most determining factor for the explanation of differences in the uptake of both OA-types turned out to be academic self-governance. For the year 2020, Hybrid OA transformative agreements have become a second relevant factor. However, all variables that reflect local infrastructural support and services for OA (managerial self-governance) turned out to be non-significant. To deepen the understanding of the adoption of OA on the level of institutions, the outcomes of the regression analyses are contextualised by an interview study conducted with 20 OA officers of German universities.

Der Beitrag stellt den Einsatz des kommerziellen Cloud-Computing-Dienstes Google BigQuery für die Arbeit mit großen offenen Datensätzen über wissenschaftliche Veröffentlichungen an der Niedersächsischen Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen (SUB Göttingen) vor, insbesondere bezogen auf den Datenbestand, die Prozessierung und die Zugriffsmöglichkeiten. Als beispielhafter Use Case werden überregionale Open-Access-Transformationsverträgen in Deutschland bezogen auf ihren Open-Access-Anteil analysiert.

Zusammenfassung Analysen im Bereich des Open-Access-Publizierens haben sich mit der Verfügbarkeit großer vernetzter Datensammlungen wie Unpaywall bedeutend vereinfacht. Der Artikel untersucht die Entwicklung des Datenbestands und der -struktur seit 2018. Eine Vollerhebung der Zeitschriftenartikel des Zeitraums 2008–2018 zeigt, dass der OA-Anteil kontinuierlich wächst. Allerdings variiert die OA-Kategorisierung, was methodische Fragen beim Publikationsmonitoring und in der bibliometrischen Forschung aufwirft.

In 2014, a union of German research organisations established Projekt DEAL, a national-level project to negotiate licensing agreements with large scientific publishers. Negotiations between DEAL and Elsevier began in 2016, and broke down without a successful agreement in 2018; in this time, around 200 German research institutions cancelled their license agreements with Elsevier, leading Elsevier to restrict journal access at those institutions from July 2018 onwards. We investigated the effect of these access restrictions on researchers' publishing and citing behaviours from a bibliometric perspective, using a dataset of ~410,000 articles published by researchers at the affected DEAL institutions between 2012-2020. We further investigated these effects with respect to the timing of contract cancellations with Elsevier, research disciplines, collaboration patterns, and article open-access status. We find evidence for a decrease in Elsevier's market share of articles from DEAL institutions, from a peak of 25.3% in 2015 to 20.6% in 2020, with the largest year-on-year market share decreases occurring in 2019 (-1.1%) and 2020 (-1.6%) following the implementation of access restrictions. We also observe year-on-year decreases in the proportion of citations made from articles published by authors at DEAL institutions to articles in Elsevier journals post-2018, although the decrease is smaller (-0.4% in 2019 and -0.6% in 2020) than changes in publishing volume. We conclude that Elsevier access restrictions have led to some reduced willingness of researchers at DEAL institutions to publish their research in Elsevier journals, but that researchers are not strongly affected in their ability to cite Elsevier articles, with the implication that researchers use a variety of other methods (e.g. interlibrary loans, sharing between colleagues, or "shadow libraries") to access scientific literature.

This study investigates the development of open access (OA) to journal articles from authors affiliated with German universities and non-university research institutions in the period 2010–2018. Beyond determining the overall share of openly available articles, a systematic classification of distinct categories of OA publishing allowed us to identify different patterns of adoption of OA. Taking into account the particularities of the German research landscape, variations in terms of productivity, OA uptake and approaches to OA are examined at the meso-level and possible explanations are discussed. The development of the OA uptake is analysed for the different research sectors in Germany (universities, non-university research institutes of the Helmholtz Association, Fraunhofer Society, Max Planck Society, Leibniz Association, and government research agencies). Combining several data sources (incl. Web of Science, Unpaywall, an authority file of standardised German affiliation information, the ISSN-Gold-OA 3.0 list, and OpenDOAR), the study confirms the growth of the OA share mirroring the international trend reported in related studies. We found that 45% of all considered articles during the observed period were openly available at the time of analysis. Our findings show that subject-specific repositories are the most prevalent type of OA. However, the percentages for publication in fully OA journals and OA via institutional repositories show similarly steep increases. Enabling data-driven decision-making regarding the implementation of OA in Germany at the institutional level, the results of this study furthermore can serve as a baseline to assess the impact recent transformative agreements with major publishers will likely have on scholarly communication.

Analysen im Bereich des Open Access-Publizierens haben sich mit der Verfügbarkeit großer vernetzter Datensammlungen wie Unpaywall bedeutend vereinfacht. Der Artikel untersucht die Entwicklung des Datenbestands und der -struktur seit 2018. Eine Vollerhebung der Zeitschriftenartikel des Zeitraums 2008-18 zeigt, dass der OA-Anteil kontinuierlich wächst. Allerdings variiert die OA-Kategorisierung, was methodische Fragen beim Publikationsmonitoring und in der bibliometrischen Forschung aufwirft.