The Transformation of the Green Road to Open Access

Abstract

(1) Background: The 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative recommended the self-archiving of scientific articles in open repositories, which has been described as the “green road” to open access. Twenty years later, only one part of the researchers deposits their publications in open repositories; moreover, one part of the repositories’ content is not based on self-archived deposits but on mediated nonfaculty contributions. The purpose of the paper is to provide more empirical evidence on this situation and to assess the impact on the future of the green road. (2) Methods: We analyzed the contributions to the French national HAL repository from more than 1000 laboratories affiliated with the ten most important French research universities, with a focus on 2020, representing 14,023 contributor accounts and 164,070 deposits. (3) Results: We identified seven different types of contributor accounts, including deposits from nonfaculty staff and import flows from other platforms. Mediated nonfaculty contributions (deposits by libraries, import of bibliographic records, migration from other platforms, etc.) account for at least 48% of the 2020 deposits. We also identified differences between institutions and disciplines. (4) Conclusions: Our empirical results reveal a transformation of open repositories from self-archiving and direct scientific communication towards research information management. Repositories like HAL are somewhere in the middle of the process. The paper describes data quality as the main issue and major challenge of this transformation.

Challenges of Open Science: Problems of Metadata Research and Analysis of Scientometric Indicators of Scientists (Experience of the Scientific Library of Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University)

“…The continuous development of open science requires innovative decisions, which are based on modern research of the international scientific community, namely: 1) open access (Schöpfel et al, 2023;Holley, 2018;Eve & Gray, 2020) and open science (Center for Open Science, n.d.), its promotion (Boyack, Smith, & Klavans, 2020); 2) definition of the concept of metadata (Qin & Zeng, 2022) and management of metadata (Metascience, 2023); 3) roles of universities (Robinson-Garcia, Costas, & van Leeuwen, 2020), repositories and the importance of academic libraries in the promotion of knowledge in relevant areas (Khosrow-Pour, 2019;Lo, Cho, Chiu, & Allard, 2019;Information Resources Management Association, 2020).…”