Members of the CORE Team have been working on submissions for the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) and today we are extremely happy to inform our readers that our two teams have both received acceptance notices. Doctors Bikash Gyawali, Nancy Pontika and Petr Knoth have been working on “Open Access 2007-2017: Country and University Level Perspective” while David Pride and Dr. Petr Knoth worked on another submission entitled “An Authoritative Approach to Citation Classification”.
JCDL is one of the prime venues for the publication of research related to scholarly data processing, digital libraries and associated technical, practical, and social issues. It is jointly sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
The dataset of the first paper contains 400 universities from 8 countries around the world. The authors examined the total number of open access (OA) papers published in each country in the period 2007 – 2017, the proportion of OA papers published by representative universities in each country and how these compare to each other.
OA has gained much traction in scientific publishing lately and many studies have reported on the overall OA growth. Instead, here, the authors investigate the OA scenario at the granularity of university and country level assessment and this is the first study of this kind. To conduct their study, the authors selected an appropriate mix of developed and less developed countries and analysed the OA performance of three tiers of universities (high, middle and low – based on their research quality and citation impact) within those countries.
Data is retrieved from the latest data compiled from multiple sources including the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), CORE Discovery and the Times Higher Education World University Ranking 2020 (THE WUR). It therefore provides a timely update on the current OA status of countries/universities while at the same time, reflects the OA performance of universities in comparison to their rankings in the THE WUR.
The main challenge was in terms of consolidating data from the various sources. It is a common experience when working with multiple data sources to arrive at a condition where data from one case can’t be linked to the other or some parts of the data might be missing. In addition to such issues, a very important consideration the authors took into account in this work is the time needed for deposit of OA content into scholarly repositories and their discovery; hence we extract and analyse the papers published up to 2017 only.
This study does not make a distinction between OA papers published in journals vs. those submitted in repositories, as well as those that can be distinguished into Gold OA and Green OA. It would be interesting to delve deeper into these aspects to better position our understanding of OA in the future. Moreover, different institutions/countries have their own OA policies. Studying such factors and the impact they could make on OA publications is an interesting avenue for research; the research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement number 824612, ON-MERRIT EU-funded project, which already takes this lead.
The second paper, by David Pride and Dr. Petr Knoth, examined why authors cite particular works. There has long been an interest in understanding reasons for citation, but previous studies have been limited by the size of the datasets available to them. The CORE team created the Academic Citation Typing (ACT) platform, an online tool for annotating citations according to the purpose and influence on the citing author. The ACT platform was used to survey first authors – 883 authors responded and annotated over 11,000 citations. This is the largest dataset of its type and the only one annotated by authors.
The new ACT dataset and tool can now be used to create models for the automatic determination of citation type which has wide ranging applications in the scholarly communication domain. Additionally, every current bibliometric measure relies on the blunt tool of simple metrics, which count all citations with equal weight. There is far more than can be inferred about the impact of a piece of research if we know not only that it was cited, by why it was cited. Furthermore, the ACT platform itself can be adopted at the point of article submission by conferences, repositories and journals, which presents the opportunity for capturing citation reason information at the point of publication.
Both papers are available to read via the Open University Open Research Online institutional repository. Follow the links to read the papers:
1) “Open Access 2007-2017: Country and University Level Perspective”,
2) “An Authoritative Approach to Citation Classification”.
The CORE Team