Abstract
Objectives: This small-scale study explores the current state of connections between open data and open access (OA) articles in the life sciences. Methods: This study involved 44 openly available life sciences datasets from the Illinois Data Bank that had 45 related research articles. For each article, I gathered the OA status of the journal and the article on the publisher website and checked whether the article was openly available via Unpaywall and Research Gate. I also examined how and where the open data was included in the HTML and PDF versions of the related articles. Results: Of the 45 articles studied, less than half were published in Gold/Full OA journals, and while the remaining articles were published in Gold/Hybrid journals, none of them were OA. This study found that OA articles pointed to the Illinois Data Bank datasets similarly to all of the related articles, most commonly with a data availability statement containing a DOI. Conclusions: The findings indicate that Gold OA in hybrid journals does not appear to be a popular option, even for articles connected to open data, and this study emphasizes the importance of data repositories providing DOIs, since the related articles frequently used DOIs to point to the Illinois Data Bank datasets. This study also revealed concerns about free (not licensed OA) access to articles on publisher websites, which will be a significant topic for future research.
Highlights
Scientific researchers must consider a myriad of options and expectations when preparing to disseminate their research results—publications and data
The Illinois Data Bank had 70 life sciences datasets published by April 30, 2019, and of those, 44 dataset records included at least one related article
The results cannot be used to make broad generalizations on the state of connections between open data and open access (OA) articles in the life sciences, but this study explores this important topic and points to several key findings that could be investigated in the future with larger sample sizes or with different methodologies
Summary
Scientific researchers must consider a myriad of options and expectations when preparing to disseminate their research results—publications and data Their funding agency, such as those included in the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s public access memo (Holdren 2013), may expect the resulting research data and publications to be made freely available to the public. Journal publishers in their field may encourage or require the research data underlying their article to be shared openly (Wiley 2018). There are numerous options for sharing research data (e.g., supplementary materials, disciplinary and institutional data repositories) and a variety of publishing options (e.g., full OA journals, hybrid journals, subscription-only journals)
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