Thread by @wragge

As a little experiment for #OAWeek2020, I’ve saved the details of 242 articles published in @AHSjournal between 2008 and 2018 using Zotero.

@AHSjournal has a Green OA embargo period of 18 months, so things published in 2018 or earlier should be outside the embargo.

@AHSjournal So how many Green OA versions of these 242 articles will we find using @OA_Button?

Any guesses?

To answer this I’m getting the article DOIs via the Zotero API and then feeding them to the OA Button API.

So the results...

@AHSjournal @OA_Button 18 of 242 articles are green or gold open access.

5 of these gold OA (ie via APC).

13 are green OA (accepted manuscripts in institutional repos).

There are also 2 articles that the journal has made ‘free access’. These don’t show up in the OA Button results.

20 of 242 – 8%.

@AHSjournal @OA_Button Are the articles not being deposited? Are the embargo settings wrong? Are the repositories not being indexed? I’m not sure.

I’m going to try using the Trove API to see if there are versions in repositories that aren’t showing up in these results.

More updates later...

@AHSjournal @OA_Button OMG this is getting depressing…

@AHSjournal @OA_Button Ok, an update…

Of the 242 research articles in Australian Historical Studies from 2008 to 2018, I found that 120 had records in repositories (via @TroveAustralia).

@AHSjournal @OA_Button @TroveAustralia Trove links to repositories have various ‘types’: ‘fulltext’, ‘not online’, and ‘restricted’.

As you might guess, ‘fulltext’ links are supposed to lead to full text versions of articles.

14 of the articles have ‘fulltext’ links in Trove.

@AHSjournal @OA_Button @TroveAustralia 5 of the ‘fulltext’ links go to articles that I’d already found the Green OA link for via the OA Button API. So YAY! That’s exactly how things are meant to work.

4 of these are in the Griffith Uni repo. The other is USQ.

So what about the other 9?

@AHSjournal @OA_Button @TroveAustralia One of these goes to the UNSW repository. And it does indeed have a Green OA version ready to download: handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/unswork…

So why doesn’t it show up in the OA Button/Unpaywall db? (OA Button uses Unpaywall data.)

@AHSjournal @OA_Button @TroveAustralia You can search Unpaywall’s list of sources here: unpaywall.org/sources

The @UNSWLibrary repo, UNSWorks *is* listed as a source. So why isn’t the article being found?

I don’t know, but the Unpaywall extension doesn’t run at all in UNSWorks, so it doesn’t seem to recognise it.

@AHSjournal @OA_Button @TroveAustralia @UNSWLibrary The other 8 ‘fulltext’ links all go to @UWALibrary. I clicked on them, but as far as I can see they don’t provide anything to download. So that’s disappointing. :-(

@AHSjournal @OA_Button @TroveAustralia @UNSWLibrary @UWALibrary Just as the ‘fulltext’ link type can be misleading, it’s possible that some of the ‘not online’ and ‘restricted’ links actually point to OA versions.

I haven’t checked them all, but I did a bit of semi-random clicking and found one example at @uonlib: hdl.handle.net/1959.13/805160

@AHSjournal @OA_Button @TroveAustralia @UNSWLibrary @UWALibrary @uonlib In this case, I can’t find the @uonlib repository in the Unpaywall list of sources. Might be a good idea to add it Newcastle! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI…

@AHSjournal @OA_Button @TroveAustralia @UNSWLibrary @UWALibrary @uonlib So after all that, I’ve increased my count of Green OA articles by one, from 13 to 14…

There might be others that aren’t getting properly picked up by Trove, but it seems that the problem is mainly with getting Green OA versions of articles into the repositories.

So I’ll conclude with a few reminders.

Under T&F conditions for Australian Historical Studies, you can make the Author Accepted version of your article (after peer review, but before typesetting & proofreading) freely available in a repository 18 months after publication.

You can also share the AAM version immediately through your personal website (and there are ways of encouraging Google Scholar to find them).

Most institutional repositories will let you specify an embargo period when you deposit an AAM for Green OA, so do it when it’s published and then it’ll get opened up automatically 18 months later.

If you’re not attached to a university, you can use a subject repository like Humanities Commons: hcommons.org/core/

Or a general research repo like Zenodo: zenodo.org

If it all seems too hard, try Share Your Paper: shareyourpaper.org

Historians get worked up about online access to primary sources in GLAM organisations. I reckon they also need to take some responsibility in ensuring that the products of their own research are as accessible as possible, and not locked behind paywalls.

I’ll clean up the code and documentation I used for this and share shortly. Didn’t really mean to spend the whole day on this… 😣

Whoops, made a mistake above — the total number of Green OA versions of @AHSjournal research articles (from 2008 to 2018) I’ve found is now 15:

13 via Open Access Button API.

1 ‘fulltext’ link in Trove.

1 mislabelled link in Trove.

@AHSjournal Add the 5 Gold OA & 2 with free access and we have 22 of 242 – a rather underwhelming 9.09%.

Surely we can do better than this...

@AHSjournal ARC policies on open access should have an impact on publications arising from grant funded research. I stopped at 2018 because it was outside the embargo period, but it might be interesting to include 2019-20.