Is it worth establishing institutional repositories? The strategies for open access to Spanish peer‐reviewed articles

Abstract

We examine open access to the Spanish scientific literature via investigation of a sample of peer‐reviewed articles in seven subject categories. Of the 28,259 papers published in 2000, 26.89% were freely accessible, with the share varying among disciplines. Articles in the social and behavioral sciences were the most widely available for free. This disciplinary divide applies also to the strategies used to offer open access to documents. In clinical medicine, life sciences, arts and humanities and social sciences open access was mainly based on the publishers' side, while subject‐based repositories were dominant in physical, chemical and earth sciences and deposit on homepages was the preferred strategy in engineering, computing and technology. Institutional and general repositories seem to play a minor role in providing free access to the Spanish peer‐reviewed literature. Papers published in commercial journals are less accessible than those that appear in non‐commercial journals, and we found overlaps in almost 20% of papers deposited. The fastest way to gain open access is to deposit in subject‐based repositories and the longest delays are related to deposits in homepages and especially to institutional repositories. Open access to Spanish peer‐reviewed articles is dominated by the passive mechanism of the “gold route” and the editorial strategy with self‐archiving practices in the minority and directed mainly towards subject‐based repositories and homepage posting of the papers. The results of this study could serve as a reference point for further study on the evolution of open access in Spain.

Evolution of institutional repositories: Managing institutional research output to remove the gap of academic elitism

“…The already established subject repositories contributed a lot towards OA with Mathematical Physics Preprint Archive (mp_arc) and Arxiv , launched in 1991, followed by Research Papers in Economics ( RePEc ) and CERN ’ s E-print repository (CERN Document Server) together employed in 1993. Digital Library of Information Science and Technology ( DLIST ) in 2002, and E-prints in Library and Information Science (E-LIS) in 2003, devoted to library and information Science research also came on the scene ( Rodríguez-Armentia and Amat, 2010: 195). Since then, every institution which recognizes the benefits of academic and scholarly openness tests waters with IRs.…”

“…IRs can be considered alongside other issues as active strategies for providing free access to scholarly documents. They are active because they depend on the author’s initiative to self-archive and disseminate his or her works’ (Kakai, 2018; Rodríguez-Armentia and Amat, 2010: 196). The philosophy of activism increases the possibilities of an author(s) to stay as active research element, which in turn increases his or her research potential and help in the attainment of better academic scores for him or her.…”

“…Kensuke et al (2018) view IRs as a system for archiving digital research outputs such as scholarly papers. Rodríguez-Armentia and Amat (2010: 196) view an IR as a ‘digital collection of the academic and research output of a given community and the services that enable the storing and diffusion of that output’. Crow (2002: 4) defines IRs as ‘digital collections capturing and preserving the intellectual output of a single or multi-university community’.…”

Interlending and document supply: a review of the recent literature: 72

“…A study of 28,259 Spanish research papers (defined as having at least one Spanish author) which were published in 2000 found nearly 27 per cent to be freely accessible via searches carried out in Google and Google Scholar – so today probably a higher percentage is accessible as Google, which whilst good is not comprehensive; in addition OA has become more widespread since 2000. They conclude that “The fastest way to gain open access is to deposit in subject‐based repositories and the longest delays are related to deposits in home pages and especially to institutional repositories” (Rodríguez‐Armentia and Amat, 2010).…”