Four or Five Shades of Openness: A Taxonomy of Open Access Dr John Paull School of Geography & Environmental Studies University of Tasmania [email protected]Open UTAS to the World Teaching Matters 2013 28-29 November University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia ★★ ★★
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Open Access - Four or Five Shades of Openness: A Taxonomy of Open Access - Dr John Paull
At Manor Farm it was a case of: “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others” (Orwell, 1945, p.118). The World Wide Web has enabled the proliferation of open access (OA) publishing and there are now more than 10,000 OA academic journals (DOAJ, 2013). They are not, however, equally open, and indeed some OA journals are ‘more open than others’. Four indices of openness have been proposed as a basis for rating OA journals for openness, viz.: “there is no barrier to access for the reader”; “it is free to the author/s”; “copyright is retained by the author/s”; and, “the paper can be freely distributed under licence” (Paull, 2013, p.3). In this paper a stratified random sample of OA journals (n=200) is evaluated. For each journal, each index was rated as meeting (i=1 ) or not meeting (i=0) each index criterion. This rating system generates an n-tuple for each OA journal (J1-200(i1, i2, i3, i4) where each index, (i1, i2, i3, i4), takes the value ‘1’ or ‘0’. Adding the index values, (i1 + i2 + i3 + i4 ), for each journal generates, for each journal, an openness rating (OR) of from 0 to 4 (according to how many indices were scored in the affirmative) and thus five potential shades of openness, which are here characterized as ‘star ratings’. As with other star-rating systems (e.g. hotel accommodation) aggregating index scores is a lossy system and generates a taxonomic classification system with a claim of comparability (rather than equality) within each classification band. The results were that 97.5% of OA journals placed no impediment in the way of access for readers (including no requirement to register-to-read nor to accept cookies); 62.5% charged no fee to the author/s (fees ranged from £24 to US$2135); 55.5% of OA journals left the copyright with the author/s; and 67.5% declared a free-to-distribute licence (most usually CC-BY and its variations). Of the sample, no OA journal scored just zero for its openness rating, 6% of OA journals rated a single star, 28% rated as 2 stars, 43% rated 3-stars, and 23% of OA journals rated as 4-stars for openness. If it is accepted that meeting the four criteria is desirable and/or best practice then the results reveal plenty of room for improvement in the practice of OA journal publishing.
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