Benchmarking institutonal participation in open access

Posted on 25 August 2008
Filed under Academia, Open access

Benchmarks and peer comparison are handy motivators. So I’m interested in the new tool released by open access journal publisher Hindawi as part of its new institutional membership program. The new tool allows anyone to see at a glance the entirety of an institution’s affiliates’ participation with Hindawi journals.

See, e.g., the page for the University of Florida. We see that 73 articles in Hindawi journals were authored by UF researchers, by 91 individual authors; that 21 UF researchers are editors of a Hindawi journal, and that 59 UF researchers have reviewed articles for a Hindawi journal.

That’s neat to know — but how does it compare to peer institutions?

Currently, the information only appears to be available through the page for each institution (in the format http://www.hindawi.com/institutions/institution’s domain/). I hope Hindawi will provide an open API for this data to facilitate tools for making comparisons, finding connections, etc. And I hope other OA publishers will follow Hindawi’s lead by providing a similar service — along with OA archives and services such as the DOAJ.

I’m not an expert on the metadata formats currently in use, but clearly author information should be available in a standardized format, making it easy to extract, aggregate, and analyze.

Who knows what we might reveal about the anthropology of participation in OA, if only we had the data in a malleable format?

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