Checking Wellcome Trust funded Open Access articles— Paywall Watch

lterrat's bookmarks 2017-03-19

Summary:

"Robert Kiley of the Wellcome Trust has made public official data on the APC spend on ‘open access’ articles paid for by the Wellcome Trust over at his figshare profile. This was a brilliant thing to do. Many people have made thought-provoking and brilliant analysis of this data. The data has been copied many times and I see it now in manydifferent github repositories.

According to Robert Kiley’s figshare data for 2013-2014 Wellcome Trust paid £1,194 to Emerald to make an article entitled Running a hospital patient safety campaign: a qualitative study open access at the publisher website. I followed the DOI link given and found that today this article is paywalled, and is being advertised for sale at £20 for 30 days of access by Emerald Group Publishing (screenshot below)

[...]

To help check article DOIs in a simple and automated manner, I used the R package httr. The code I used is available as a github gist. The code works well for articles hosted at all publishers except one: Elsevier. Any attempt to follow DOI links with R::httr just hangs and I have to use a timeout to ensure that my script skips over such problems to proceed onto the next article.

Can Elsevier really call what they are offering ‘open access’ if it is not openly accessible by automated methods such as R::httr scripts? I don’t have time to expound upon this at length here, but I will certainly return to this particular point at a later date.

Conclusions

So there you have it. Super simple automated checks of just a few thousand Wellcome Trust funded ‘open access’ articles by their DOIs has revealed three rather interesting things, and supports my overall thesis that we need to continuously monitor academic publishers: not just 'one-time' compliance checks.

I really do think this is the start of something very interesting. I have plans. WATCH THIS SPACE!"

Link:

http://www.paywallwatch.com/blog/Checking-Wellcome-Trust-funded-Open-Access-article/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » lterrat's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.journals

Date tagged:

03/19/2017, 20:47

Date published:

03/19/2017, 16:47