CWTS Leiden Ranking 2019 Provides Indicators of Open Access Publishing and Gender Diversity

From Leiden University:

Open access publishing and gender diversity are among the most heavily debated issues in science policy. To inform the debate on these important topics, the 2019 edition of the CWTS Leiden Ranking, released earlier today, introduces indicators of open access publishing and gender diversity. These indicators, made available for all 963 universities worldwide included in the ranking, offer a large amount of systematic evidence on open access publishing and gender diversity at the level of research-intensive higher education institutions.

Open access indicators

The Leiden Ranking is based on data from Web of Science. We calculated the open access indicators in the Leiden Ranking 2019 by combining data from Web of Science and Unpaywall. Following a recent study on open access publishing, indicators are provided for four types of open access:

• Gold. Publications in an open access journal.
• Hybrid. Publications in a subscription journal that are open access.
• Bronze. Publications in a journal that are open access without a license.
• Green. Publications in a journal that are also available in an open access repository.

In addition, we also provide an indicator of overall open access publishing, combining the gold, hybrid, bronze, and green forms of open access. More information about the open access indicators made available in the Leiden Ranking 2019 is provided in a blog post by our colleagues Thed van Leeuwen, Rodrigo Costas, and Nicolas Robinson-Garcia.

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Gender indicators

To obtain the gender indicators introduced in the Leiden Ranking 2019, we tried to determine for all publications of a university the gender of the authors affiliated with the university. This was done based on the first name of an author combined with the country of the author. We made use of Gender API together with Genderize.io and Gender Guesser. Only gender assignments with an accuracy of at least 90% were taken into account. When an accurate gender assignment could not be made, we considered the gender of an author to be unknown. More details on the gender indicator methodology can be found here.

The new indicators introduced in the 2019 edition of the Leiden Ranking provide large-scale systematic evidence to inform science policy discussions on open access publishing and gender diversity. The indicators can be used to trace developments over time within individual universities and to make comparisons between universities. The indicators may serve to demonstrate the need for institutional policies on open access publishing and gender diversity, and they may be used to evaluate the effects of such policies. We hope to add other similar indicators in future editions of the Leiden Ranking.

Read the Complete Blog Post

Direct to Leiden Ranking 2019

Filed under: Data Files, News, Open Access, Publishing