Why we need a public infrastructure for data on open access

"[O]btaining a comprehensive bird’s-eye view of journal publishing often relies on using the data and services of commercial bibliographic database providers. This not only risks vested commercial interests informing science policy (Tennant 2018), but also maintains the underlying data infrastructure as proprietary and closed. With only limited information on the research landscape – and thereby limited information on the effects of policy interventions – as factors influencing and steering policy is, to put it mildly, not optimal....

Improved precision and coverage of bibliometric data would allow us to begin answering the following questions: ● How is open access publishing growing in comparison to the overall growth of science, in terms of number of journals and number of articles? ● How many journals publishing open access started as open access journals? ● How many journals publishing open access have flipped to open access from first being subscription-based? ● How many open access journals have become subscription-based? ● How have article processing charges developed over time? Is this development uniform across research disciplines/publishers/countries? ● How many journals (open access or not) have became inactive? ● How many articles have been published as hybrid open access in subscription-journals? ● How many articles were published as delayed open access in subscription-journals last year? ● How has the market for open access publishing changed since the introduction of a specific policy intervention (e.g. Plan S)? ● How has the development and adoption of public open access infrastructures progressed? ...

This post is intended to raise awareness about the current drawbacks of the information landscape around journals, and particularly how it relates to our limited knowledge about the history, current status, and trajectory of open access journal publishing. Unfortunately, there are no easy solutions but the next step would be to initiate a wider discussion about potential ways to provide access to journal metadata as well as web services to aggregate and present the data in an usable way...."