Do open access transformative agreements change publication behaviour?

A study at the Medical University of Vienna

Abstract

Objectives — The objective of this paper was to investigate the impact of the open access (OA) transition agreements introduced at the Medical University of Vienna in 2016 via the Austrian academic library consortium ‘Kooperation E-Medien Österreich’ (KEMÖ) on the publishing behaviour of researchers at the Medical University of Vienna. One of the main questions was whether these new types of agreements have actually led to an increase in open access publications as expected beforehand.

Methods — The years from 2015 (i. e. one year before the introduction of the transition agreements) to 2019 were chosen as the evaluation period. In generating the data pool, all publications from the above-mentioned period that could be attributed to the Medical University of Vienna were identified in the ‘Web of Science Core Collection’ (WoS CC) citation database and exported to an Excel spreadsheet. This was then supplemented with numerous bibliometric data from the analysis tool InCites. The analysis itself focused on four main topics: ‘publication activity’, ‘visibility’, ‘citation analysis (impact)’, and ‘usage’.

Results — Over the observed period, there was a substantial increase in OA publications, with the OA type hybrid (called ‘Other Gold’ in InCites) growing particularly strongly. In the same period, closed access publications declined by over 12 %. In the categories ‘visibility’, ‘impact’ and ‘usage’, OA publications—especially those of the hybrid type— also did exceptionally well. In all four categories, OA is clearly ahead of closed access, according to the respective evaluation criteria.

Conclusions — The particularly good performance of OA publications in the four evaluation categories of output, visibility, impact and usage, and above all the strong increase in OA publication activity, indicate that the model examined in the context of the OA transition agreements has been and continues to be very well received by researchers at the Medical University of Vienna. Especially, the hybrid OA type, which is particularly promoted in said agreements, achieved top scores in all four categories.