Open Access Statistics: An Examination how to generate Interoperable Usage Information from Distributed Open Access Services Publishing

Abstract

Publishing and bibliometric indicators are of utmost relevance for scientists and research institutions. The impact or importance of a publication (or even of a scientist or an institution) is mostly regarded to be equivalent to a citation-based indicator, e.g. in form of the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) or the Hirsch-Index (h-index). Both on an individual and an institutional level performance measurement depends strongly on these impact scores. The most common methods to assess the impact of scientific publications show several deficiencies, for instance: · The scope of the databases that are used to calculate citation-based metrics (Web of Science WoS respectively the Journal Citation Reports JCR and Scopus) is restricted and more or less arbitrarily defined. · The JIF and h-index are showing several disciplinary biases (exclusion of many document types, the two years timeframe of the JIF, etc.). · Both JIF and h-index are privileging documents in English language. Even though in principle citation-based metrics provide some arguments pro open access, they mostly disadvantage open access publications - and by that reduce the attractiveness of open access for scientists. Especially documents that are self-archived on open access repositories (and not published in an open access journal) are excluded from the relevant databases that are typically used to calculate JIF-scores or the h-index.