Measuring open access publications: a novel normalized open access indicator

Abdelghani Maddi ()

Scientometrics, 2020, vol. 124, issue 1, No 16, 379-398

Abstract: Abstract The issue of open access (OA) to scientific publications is attracting growing interest within the scientific community and among policy makers. Open access indicators are being calculated. In its 2019 ranking, the “Centre for Science and Technology Studies” (CWTS) provides the number and the share of OA publications per institution. This gives an idea of the degree of openness of institutions. However, not taking into account the disciplinary specificities and the specialization of institutions makes comparisons based on the shares of OA publications biased. We show that OA publishing practices vary considerably according to discipline. As a result, we propose two methods to normalize OA share; by WoS subject categories and by disciplines. Normalized Open Access Indicator (NOAI) corrects for disciplinary composition and allows a better comparability of institutions or countries.

Keywords: Open access; Normalization; Institutions; Disciplinary differences; Bibliometric indicators; 01-08; 00Axx; C43; L82; D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-020-03470-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:scient:v:124:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1007_s11192-020-03470-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-020-03470-0

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().