“YERUN universities display a variety of profiles, specialising in different fields of knowledge and also show great diversity in their size. These features, together with the existence of a common Open Access policy, make this network of universities a particularly suitable sample of institutions to research.”
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About the collaboration:
The research collaboration between Jorge Mañana, from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, and Tim Engels and Raf Gus, from the University of Antwerp, had two main objectives: a) to quantify the Open Access (OA) availability in the various fields of knowledge in the Web of Science (WoS hereafter) and the specialisation of the YERUN universities, crossing both data to identify potential issues in the feasibility of the current Open Access policies at the Network level; b) to identify the evolution of the publications in Gold-Hybrid OA for the Network as a proxy for the increase in the expenses of OA publications for the Network’s universities.
In this work, the three researchers hypothesise that the percentages of OA journals in the various fields of knowledge present strong variations and that this feature makes universities specialising in different fields of knowledge depart from different situations regarding the publication of their outputs in OA. Also, so-called Gold-Hybrid journals have been growing in number recently. These journals usually follow a subscription business model, but publish certain articles in OA provided that the authors pay the so-called Article Processing Charges. The evolution of this type of publications is also an important factor to be analysed together with the intersection between specialisation and OA availability.
