Open access publishing and author rights: A local and comparative study of selected ARLs

Abstract

This bibliometric study was performed to gain a better understanding of open access (OA) journal publishing at a large U.S. research university. While there is an increasing amount of aggregated data about OA publishing, there are few studies that examine local institutional OA publishing patterns. This study addresses that deficiency. Publications for Texas A&M University (TAMU) were located using Scopus and the Gold OA journals among those publications were identified. It was determined that approximately 9% of the articles published at TAMU were in Gold OA journals. Most of these journals were concentrated in Science (Q), Medicine (R), Agriculture (S), and Technology (T). The author rights of these journals were also examined and categorized. The majority of journals examined allowed authors to retain copyright, but more than 20% required the authors to transfer some or all of their copyright. To provide context and comparison, the percentage of Gold OA articles among 16 peer institutions, all public Association of Research Libraries (ARLs), was also determined using Web of Science. Gold OA publishing among the 16 peer institutions was between 4.99% and 9.45%. Scopus indicated a higher level of Gold OA publishing at TAMU compared to Web of Science.