Journal Article: “Do Open Access Mandates Work? A Systematized Review of the Literature on Open Access Publishing Rates”

The journal article linked below was recently published by the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Title

Do Open Access Mandates Work? A Systematized Review of the Literature on Open Access Publishing Rates

Authors

Elena Azadbakht
University of Nevada, Reno

Tara Radniecki
University of Nevada, Reno

Teresa Auch Schultz
University of Nevada, Reno

Amy Shannon
University of Nevada, Reno

Source

Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 11(1), eP15444.

DOI: doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.15444

Abstract

To encourage the sharing of research, various entities—including public and private funders, universities, and academic journals—have enacted open access (OA) mandates or data sharing policies. It is unclear, however, whether these OA mandates and policies increase the rate of OA publishing and data sharing within the research communities impacted by them. A team of librarians conducted a systematized review of the literature to answer this question. A comprehensive search of several scholarly databases and grey literature sources resulted in 4,689 unique citations. However, only five articles met the inclusion criteria and were deemed as having an acceptable risk of bias. This sample showed that although the majority of the mandates described in the literature were correlated with a subsequent increase in OA publishing or data sharing, the presence of various confounders and the differing methods of collecting and analyzing the data used by the studies’ authors made it impossible to establish a causative relationship.

Direct to Full Text Article
19 pages; PDF.

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