Abstract
Abstract We use several sources to collect and evaluate academic scientific publication on a country-wide scale, and we apply it to the case of France for the years 2015–2020, while presenting a more detailed analysis focused on the reference year 2019. These sources are diverse: databases available by subscription (Scopus, Web of Science) or open to the scientific community (Microsoft Academic Graph), the national open archive HAL, and databases serving thematic communities (ADS and PubMed). We show the contribution of the different sources to the final corpus. These results are then compared to those obtained with another approach, that of the French Open Science Barometer for monitoring open access at the national level. We show that both approaches provide a convergent estimate of the open access rate. We also present and discuss the definitions of the concepts used, and list the main difficulties encountered in processing the data. The results of this study contribute to a better understanding of the respective contributions of the main databases and their complementarity in the broad framework of a countrywide corpus. They also shed light on the calculation of open access rates and thus contribute to a better understanding of current developments in the field of open science.
Highlights
Open access to publications within the general framework of Open Science is an issue shared by many institutions, universities and research organizations, or funders
To support the policies deployed, a good knowledge of the state of publications and their open access rate seems necessary and many measurement tools have been developed for this purpose, in different contexts, such as the European Open Science Monitor (OSM), the German Open Access Monitor (OAM), the Danish Open Access Indicator, or the COKI Open Access Dashboard
5.1 Discussion of the sources used The six sources we have chosen to use provide three different insights: (1) Scopus and Web of Science provide extensive coverage of the literature in peer-reviewed journals and international conference proceedings; while Scopus has a slightly wider coverage, the use of the two databases together provides a 10 to 20% improvement over what would be obtained with a single database
Summary
Open access to publications (see e.g. Laakso & Björk, 2012; Piwowar et al, 2018) within the general framework of Open Science is an issue shared by many institutions, universities and research organizations, or funders. France is no exception: two national plans for Open Science have been successively launched, in 2018 and 2021, by the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation (MESRI). Generalizing open access to publications is the first axis of these two plans, with a goal of 100% of French scientific publications in open access by 20301, either through a publication natively in open access or through a deposit in an open archive. This national plan is in line with the European Plan S2. Other countries have adopted national strategies for monitoring Open Access (Carvalho et al, 2017)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
