Do Authors Deposit on Time? Tracking Open Access Policy Compliance

Editor's Notes

1. Many reasons why OA is important and why it is wanted, such as… Many funders starting to introduce policies to encourage OA Many people in the room probably are or have been subject to some OA policies I listed some you might have heard of
2. Many reasons why OA is important and why it is wanted, such as… Many funders starting to introduce policies to encourage OA Many people in the room probably are or have been subject to some OA policies I listed some you might have heard of
3. Source: Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies (ROARMAP) What matters in this figure is that each bar represents how many policies in the database in one quarter Rightmost bar – first quarter of 2019 Currently close to 1 thousand funder and institutional OA policies
4. Provide criteria Requirements typically include I’ve shown there are many policies and the numbers keep growing
5. Many people tried to answer this question, for example this study from 2018 has shown that… Researchers require access to recent literature OA is not enough, we need fast OA
6. Is there evidence to show that if there is a deadline authors deposit sooner?
7. To answer this question we use something we call deposit time lag We define it as … We study deposit time lag (that’s what I’ll show in this presentation) across…
8. * Explanation of how the data we need gets created and how we collect it
9. Negative value – for example if the author deposited a pre-print before review, or the post-print after review but still before publication Best case scenario is if the value is as low as possible, we want zero or negative value so that everybody has early access
10. There is a drop in 2018 simply because of when we collected the data – we have data until May 2018
11. Overall deposit time lag for top 5 countries with most publications Each bar = one week Publications at zero were deposited within the same week as they were published – we don’t care when they were published here, just when deposited Significant differences between countries, some have many early deposits, some have many late deposits
12. We wanted to know how has deposit time lag changed over time, if it’s improving or not We wanted to calculate average deposit time lag per year of publication
13. To do this we have two options, both have some limitations that I’ll explain because they affect how we can interpret the results First options is to use all data
14. To explain the limitations I have this mock example – not real data Explain what bars represent To calculate average deposit time lag per year of publication
15. The problem is that because of where we are right now for 2017 publications we don’t know about these late deposits yet We know about some from 2018, but we don’t know how many will be deposited in the future
16. This approach still underestimates, because now we’re not including late deposits at all Especially underestimates for older papers because we know from the data late deposits are becoming less common over time Because we are not aware of any better method that would alleviate the limitations of both approaches at the same time, we use these approaches in conjunction
17. Every point in both figures represents average deposit time lag for papers published in a given year This point tells us papers published in 2013 were deposited on average around 700 days later Numbers on the right lower because if you remember we have removed very late deposits We can see that deposit time lag is decreasing for all countries, especially since 2015-16 Different countries have seen different speed of decrease Looks optimistic, similar pattern in all countries Are there differences in subjects rather than countries?
18. Compare publications from two years, explain figure We can see that in 2013 average deposit time lag was quite large for all subjects except physics and math All subjects have seen significant decrease Computer science third best in 2017, might be due to depositing pre-prints becoming common practice in recent years, looks like it’s having an effect Key message – differences between subjects are substantial but not dramatic Are the differences elsewhere and can they be driven by policies?
19. Chose REF 2021 OA policy as a case study because it because it has includes a timeframe for deposit Introduce the policy It requires …
20. Explain example Any repository deposit time lag – looking at everywhere the paper was deposited, taking the first deposit date and using that to analyse the repository we are looking at We do it this way because once a publication is in an OA repository, it’s already OA, so doing this we want to see if aggregating data from all repositories helps to get access faster
21. Compliance with the REF OA policy across all UK publications Compliance is increasing
22. Results per repository, each point on each line is one repository, value represents proportion of publications in that repository that are compliant with the REF OA policy Explain the rest of figure Key message – significant differences between institutions, institutional policies matter (more than subject) “This is not a game of medicine vs physics or mathematics, this is a game of institutional policies and practices.” Some institutions make sure it happens and some don’t, It’s in the hands of institutions
23. Deposit time lag per country, point out where UK is REF OA policy introduced in 2014, it looks like in 2014 there was some change in behavior and deposit time lag starts decreasing and it has been continuously decreasing since then