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The practical implementation of open access policies and mandates in Spanish public universities

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Abstract

This paper analyses the open access (OA) production of Spanish public universities from 2011 to 2020 to achieve the following objectives: (i) to identify and analyse policies, strategies and mandates for the promotion of open access; (ii) to analyse practices related to open access of scientific publications, (iii) to explore methodologies that allow identifying variables related to open access of publications. The procedure followed consists of three phases: first, the Spanish regulation on open access is analysed; second, bibliometric techniques are applied to obtain a series of indicators related to open access of publications indexed in the web of science core collection; third, a statistical analysis based on a classification tree of variables is proposed. The results obtained show that the institutional measures and actions to promote OA identified in the policies and mandates of the universities correspond to the bibliometric data. Spanish public universities have higher rates of OA publications, with a clear preference for Green Published and DOAJ Gold publications. OA publications are systematically more cited than non-OA publications (with Green Accepted in the lead), and there is a strong relationship between visibility, funding and open access. It has also been observed that the variables that best predict whether the percentage of OA publications of a university is above average are: the proportion of publications in DOAJ Gold, the impact received by Hybrid publications and the percentage of documents in the Bronze way.

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Notes

  1. Melibea provides data on the effective implementation of the OA regulations for 17 out of 31 universities. These are the universities represented in Fig. 1.

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Acknowledgements

The results were found under "The role of Open Science in the Spanish University: Institutional transformation and anticipatory governance" (ROSSUE, PID2019-104052RB-C21) a project financed by the Spanish State Research Agency under the National RDI Plan’s RETOS call. This study was carried out with funds provided, also, by the Ramon y Cajal call (RYC2018-024894-I) from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Research and Universities. A preliminary version of this study has been presented at the ISSI 2021 conference, entitled "Open access policies and mandates and their practical implementation in Spanish public universities" (De Filippo & Mañana-Rodriguez, 2021).

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Correspondence to Daniela De Filippo.

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Appendix 1

See Table 4.

Table 4 Universities analysed

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De Filippo, D., Mañana-Rodriguez, J. The practical implementation of open access policies and mandates in Spanish public universities. Scientometrics 127, 7147–7167 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04261-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04261-x

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