DATA ANALYTICS

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Uncover your publishing profile

Transformative agreements are changing how institutions and consortia do business with commercial publishers. Under the old subscription system, service levels and return on investment were evaluated in terms of readership, in terms of FTE or usage, but with the rise of open access publishing and transformative agreements, service levels and costs are increasingly evaluated in terms of authorship, or publishing profile, and other future-oriented metrics.

Institutions and consortia approaching transformative agreements or looking to gain an understanding of the publishing trends of their affiliated authors in order to negotiate central agreements with fully open access publishers and prepare for future strategies can make use of a variety of data sources to answer key questions such as:

• • In what journals do our authors most frequently publish their articles?
  • What share of their articles is published by a given publisher?
  • How does that article share relate to the proportion of our subscription budget currently being paid to that publisher?
  • How often do our authors elect to publish their articles immediately open access in a ‘hybrid’ or fully open access journal?
  • For what percentage of their articles are they the corresponding author (responsible for payment of the relative open access publishing costs or APCs)?
  • Can we measure or estimate what are our authors currently spending on APCs “in the wild”?
  • Would a shift to open access with publisher X cost more, less, or the same as what we currently spend on subscriptions (and our authors spend on APCs)?
  • What do we consider to be a fair price for open access publishing services for our articles?

The data analysts behind some of the most impactful transformative agreements to date have put together this reference guide to share their approaches to uncovering the publishing profile of their respective organizations, in preparation for open access negotiations with commercial publishers.

• • Step 1: gather some data
    Step 2: integrate the data
    Step 3: clean and validate the data
    Step 4: format and interrogate the data
    Step 5: visualize and share the data

If you would like more information, get in touch with the OA2020-ESAC Data Analytics Working Group.