Analyzing Institutional Open Access Publishing Activity

Abstract

Scholarly communication librarians routinely promote Open Access (OA) publishing, encouraging their institutions' authors to increase their impact for the benefit of a greater number of readers. Researchers at East Carolina University (ECU) collected six years of ECU authors' publication data to analyze how much per year was free to read, and how much more could be made free for end-users to read. To do that, bibliographic information about the publications was merged with OA information provided by Unpaywall and Sherpa/RoMEO. Results were collated by author to target potential OA champions and for outreach to encourage green OA deposit when permitted. ECU's top journals, publishers, and funders were identified and our institution's OA rates were compared to those from multiple peer institutions. The authors also identified next steps, including adding data from 2021 and 2022 and analyzing that data for any potential effect of new OA memberships and publishing agreements, as well as continued outreach to authors.