Open Access Monitoring at Federal State Level

Authors

Aim of Open Access Monitoring

The topic of monitoring has gained great importance in the evaluation of the progress of open access transformation. By comparing data over time, it is possible to partly determine how effectively this transformation of the publishing cultures is taking place at the level of specific domains (national, regional, local, discipline-specific, etc.).

In the present context, monitoring refers to the continuous systematic recording and description of the development of the opening of scientific practices on the basis of certain parameters. In addition to quantitative evidence, qualitatively describable measures are also recorded.

In all of the aforementioned federal state initiatives, the aim of the monitoring is to create transparency and visibility for these developments within the federal state and to support information-based decision-making when formulating or updating strategic objectives and measures. Whereas monitoring could capture all processes of this kind at federal state level, approaches to date have often been limited to the publication output at higher education institutions.

When monitoring open science, various indicators can be taken into account, including the volume of open access publications (e.g. articles in scholarly journals, books, research data), publication costs (e.g. APCs/BPCs), the accessibility of various publishing formats (e.g. the licensing of publications), and the development and impact of transformative agreements. Monitoring can be implemented by scientific institutions, research funders, and also at national or federal state level, and various data bases and methods can be used (see, e.g., Bobrov et al. 2024).

At national level, the Open Access Monitor is an important instrument for recording inter alia the open access the publication output of German academic institutions in scholarly journals. The Monitor records and visualises the publication output by open access status (diamond/gold/green/hybrid open access, closed access) and analyses subscription fees and article processing charges as well as citations. It is based on several data sources and is the standard instrument with which institutions record eligible publications for proposals submitted under the DFG funding programme "Open Access Publication Funding". In future, further publication types, such as open access books, will be included in the Monitor.

Each networking body sets different priorities in its monitoring approach in relation to the higher education institutions in its federal state. In what follows, we describe the parameters that the three federal state initiatives currently apply when monitoring the open access activities in their respective states.

State of Brandenburg

According to the Open Access Strategy of the State of Brandenburg from the year 2019, the higher education institutions libraries should be in a position to demonstrate their publication output and transparently display the associated costs (Euler 2019, 16). To this end, a working group with mandated representatives from the libraries of all eight higher education institutions in Brandenburg was initiated by Open Access Brandenburg (VuK), who jointly developed a monitoring concept and produced a Monitoring Report for the reporting years 2021 and 2022.
Various data sources were used in Brandenburg's monitoring:

To determine the number of university members: data from the Amt für Statistik Berlin-Brandenburg
For the publication output: data from the Open Access Monitor
To determine publication costs: data from OpenAPC and the Deutsche Bibliotheksstatistik
For various parameters such as the number and type of publications in the repositories of the eight institutions: data from OPUS, among others
Data on the Publication Fund for Open Access Monographs of the State of Brandenburg
For information on strategies and services of the higher education institutions: oa.atlas.

The oa.atlas comprises two components: Information on the strategies and services of the scientific institutions in the oa.atlas can be retrieved via the open-access.network portal; the Länderdossiers (federal state dossiers) provide information on the strategies and measures in the federal states and on the part of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

During the exchange, Heike Stadler, who is responsible for monitoring at Open Access Brandenburg (VuK), stressed that for the monitoring concept in Brandenburg, it was important to represent the heterogeneity of the institutions and their respective prerequisites. Thus, the numerical publication output of these institutions cannot be juxtaposed without comment. This is particularly important in order to avoid misinterpretations.

In Brandenburg, the participating institutions agreed to joint principles for the monitoring:

Strengthening of competencies
Bibliodiversity
Sustainability of the procedure
Comparability of the higher education institutions
Participation in the process
Aggregation and reuse of available data

Heike Stadler reported how this procedure had led to better networking of the libraries of the higher education institutions in the state of Brandenburg. The monitoring process will be continued, further data sources may be added, and, where appropriate, the quantitative representations will be supplemented with qualitative descriptions. In future, the working group "Open Access Monitoring Brandenburg" will be merged with the working group for the Publication Fund to enable exchange across thematic areas and create a space for new topics.

North Rhine-Westphalia

In North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), the monitoring covers the 42 higher education institutions (including their university clinics) in the cooperative community Digitale Hochschule NRW (DH.NRW).The publication activities and costs of these institutions are determined and described by the federal state initiative openaccess.nrw.

This initiative is funded within the framework of the DH.NRW. In the monitoring reports, the data for the universities, universities of applied sciences, colleges of art and music, and university clinics of the state are summarised. The monitoring is situated in Programme Area 3 of the federal state initiative and is carried out at Bielefeld University, which produces three types of reports with the following focuses: publication output and access routes, publication costs, and proposals for funding and compensation models. For the reporting, available data sources, such as the Open Access Monitor, OpenAPC, and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) are used. In light of the challenge presented by the high number of higher education institutions and university clinics in the state and the fact that moreover they have heterogeneous starting positions with regard to repositories and institutional bibliographies, a standardised and centralised approach to producing the publication and cost reports was chosen. Therefore, in the reports the data are explicitly not interpreted at institutional level.

The OpenAPC initiative compiles datasets on fees paid for open access publications and distributes them under an open database licence on GitHub. These datasets include data on article processing charges (APCs) for open access journal articles, book processing charges (BPCs) for open access books, and data on articles that are published within the framework of transformative agreements (such as Springer Compact or the Wiley DEAL agreement).

The most recent openaccess.nrw publication report, Publikationsbericht 2023, revealed a high growth in articles at all institutions, and especially in the area of APC-based gold open access. In addition, Nina Schönfelder (Bielefeld University Library) reported that established subscription-based publishers had lost shares of the publication market, although the absolute publication numbers had remained stable.
Regular reports with a focus on publication costs – and on gold open access in particular –should therefore be produced, also in order to derive recommendations with regard to the funding and compensation models among the higher education institutions. These recommendations are drawn up with the project consortium of the federal state initiative openaccess.nrw, which comprises 15 higher education institutions as well as ZB MED and the Hochschulbibliothekszentrum (hbz) and may be addressed both to the Ministry for Culture and Science in North-Rhine Westphalia and the higher education institutions themselves.

Berlin

The Open Access Strategy for Berlin published in 2015 set a target ratio of 60% for open access articles in scholarly journals authored by members of scientific institutions in the state. This target was reached as planned in 2020 (Kindling et al. 2022). The monitoring, which was based on a specially developed methodology, ended with the data collection for the publication year 2020.
The amendment of the Berlin Higher Education Act (BerlHG) in the year 2021 initiated a strategic shift at federal state level from open access to open research. The development of an open research strategy for the federal state of Berlin is currently being pushed ahead. Thus, whereas the monitoring activities at federal state level have hitherto focused strongly on the publication output in scholarly journals, this focus will have to be expanded to include many other aspects of scientific practices. This also involves the necessity of developing and contextualising suitable indicators. It is clear that the qualitative presentation of the results achieved will become more important and that less attention will be paid to purely quantitative aspects.
The higher education institutions in the state of Berlin even have to take open research into account when evaluating research achievements within the framework of their internal research evaluation and in recruitment procedures (Berlin Higher Education Act, section 41 paragraph 5). This gives rise to challenges in the development, classification, and contextualisation of suitable open research indicators for each discipline.
The Open-Access-Büro Berlin (OABB) is currently preparing the “Open Access Bericht Berlin”. The report will describe progress in the federal state since the publication of the Open Access Strategy in 2015. Besides the starting situation and the framework conditions in the state of Berlin, the report will describe the status of the implementation of certain measures in the science and cultural heritage institutions in Berlin, including policies and guidelines, informational and infrastructure offerings, digitalisation and long-term archiving, financing and cost development, development of competencies and organisational development, research evaluation, and monitoring.
Maxi Kindling (OABB) stressed that the guiding principles for the future monitoring of the development of open research in Berlin are based on a shift of attention: In future, besides the results in the form of the number of open access publications, developments in opening the entire research process according to the principles of open research will be observed and systematically described.
As in the state of Brandenburg, the aim is to achieve greater awareness among the institutions by means of a participatory process design when implementing the monitoring. By employing multi-method evaluation instruments and a contextualised presentation of indicators in each case, the aim is to reduce the tendency to adopt a simplistic view of the open research transformation.
In Berlin, too, monitoring continues to serve the purpose of strategic exchange about institution-specific measures and the discussion of superordinate, state-wide measures.

Outlook

The three federal state initiatives are at different stages in the development of the monitoring, depending on the initial situation in the respective state. To determine the publication output, these initiatives can thankfully draw on the data and reports provided by the Open Access Monitor, whose long-term operation and further development and diversification in relation to the type of publications recorded is of great interest to all federal state initiatives. In addition, depending on the respective focus of the monitoring, the federal state initiatives will draw on further open data sources.
The monitoring of the number and costs of publications also serves as a basis for science policy decision-making. For that reason alone, a responsible and concerted approach on the part of the federal state initiatives is important. This workshop served as an initial exchange on the respective approaches, the further development, and the internally formulated principles. In light of international developments and the ambition to include open research in the monitoring in the future, the federal state initiatives are planning to also continue and report on their exchange on this topic.

This publication arose within the framework of the workshop "Monitoring at Federal State Level: Joint Principles and Perspectives" with organisational support from the project open-access.network. Responsibility for the content lies with the authors.

Suggested citation

Kaden, B., Kindling, M., Neufend, M., Schönfelder, N., & Stadler, H. (2024). Open Access Monitoring auf Landesebene. open-access.network. doi.org/10.64395/k1f03-2wn34.