Research Preprint: “Open Access –Towards a Non-Normative and Systematic Understanding”

The following article (preprint) was recently posted to arXiv.

Title

Open Access –Towards a Non-Normative and Systematic Understanding

Authors

Niels Taubert
Bielefeld University

Anne Hobert
University of Göttingen

Nick Fraser
Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (ZBW)

Najko Jahn
University of Göttingen

Elham Iravani
Bielefeld University

Source

via arXiv

Abstract 

The term Open Access not only describes a certain model of scholarly publishing — namely in digital format freely accessible to readers — but often also implies that free availability of research results is desirable, and hence has a normative character. Together with the large variety of presently used definitions of different Open Access types, this normativity hinders a systematic investigation of the development of open availability of scholarly literature. In this paper, we propose a non-normative definition of Open Access and its usage as a neutral, descriptive term in bibliometric studies and research on science. To this end, we first specify what normative figures are commonly associated with the term Open Access and then develop a neutral definition. We further identify distinguishing characteristics of openly accessible literature, called dimensions, and derive a classification scheme into Open Access categories based on these dimensions. Additionally, we present an operationalisation method to assign scientific publications to the respective categories in practice. Here, we describe useful data sources, which can be employed to gather the information needed for the classification of scholarly works according to the presented classification scheme.

Direct to Full Text Article (Preprint; October 25, 2018)
16 pages; PDF.

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