Abstract
The current state of open access to journal publications within research areas belonging to the humanities has received relatively little research attention. This study provides a detailed mapping of the bibliometric state of open access to journal publications among ethicists, taking into account not only open access publishing in journals directly, but also where and in what form ethicists make their journal articles available elsewhere on the web. As part of the study 297 ethicists affiliated with top-ranking philosophy departments were identified and their journal publication information for the years 2010–2015 were recorded (1682 unique articles). The journal articles were then queried for through Google Scholar in order to establish open access status (web locations, document versions) of each publication record. Publication records belonging to the 20 most frequently used journal outlets (subset of 597 unique articles) were put under closer inspection with regards to alignment with publisher copyright restrictions as well as measuring unused potential to share articles. The results show that slightly over half of recent journal publications are available to read for free. PhilPapers and academic social networks (Academia.edu and ResearchGate) were found to be key platforms for research dissemination in ethics research. The representation of institutional repositories as providers of access was found to be weak, receiving the second lowest frequency rating among the eight discrete web location categories. Further, the study reveals that ethicists are at the same time prone to copyright infringement and undersharing their scholarly work.
Highlights
The debate around open access is an important and complex one
In ‘‘Literature review’’ section we provide a brief literature review separated into two components: the first part concerning open access and copyright compliance in the context of scholarly journals, and the second part focusing on open access in the context of philosophy and ethics research . ‘‘Methods’’ section details the methodology used in this study and ‘‘Results’’ section is dedicated to presenting the results. ‘‘Discussion’’ section offers a discussion and answers the questions listed above in light of the results obtained. ‘‘Conclusions’’ section summarizes the main conclusions of the study
As evidenced by the reviewed literature, previous research on these issues has primarily focused on populations of journals and their outputs, or exploring open access behaviour among authors affiliated with a single institution, or users of a specific academic social networks (ASNs), whereas in this study the focus is on a broad population of researchers and building up the bibliometric data based on the publication records of individuals
Summary
The debate around open access is an important and complex one. Academic research outputs have traditionally been subjected to subscription-access and a paywall, but over the past three decades the situation has started to change. An established way to distinguish between the main channels of open access provision is by separating open access provided directly by journals (gold open access), and open access provided by authors via self-archiving (green open access). Whilst this fairly crude division has merit in simplicity, the underlying supporting mechanisms and circumstances for how and in what form an article has been made available remains hidden behind the category label. In order to obtain usable knowledge about the mechanisms enabling open access, on any level of analysis, there is a need to look beyond the surface level
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