Mapping open knowledge institutions: an exploratory analysis of Australian universities

While the movement for open research has gained momentum in recent years, there remain concerns about the broader commitment to openness in knowledge production and dissemination. Increasingly, universities are under pressure to transform themselves to engage with the wider community and to be more inclusive. Open knowledge institutions (OKIs) provide a framework that encourages universities to act with the principles of openness at their centre; not only should universities embrace digital open access (OA), but also lead actions in cultivating diversity, equity, transparency and positive changes in society. This leads to questions of whether we can evaluate the progress of OKIs and what are potential indicators for OKIs. As an exploratory study, this article reports on the collection and analysis of a list of potential OKI indicators. Data for these indicators are gathered for 43 Australian universities. The indicators provide high-dimensional and complex signals about university performances. They show evidence of large disparities in characteristics such as Indigenous employment and gender equity, and a preference for repository-mediated OA across Australian universities. We demonstrate use of the OKI evaluation framework to categorise these indicators into three platforms of diversity, communication and coordination. The analysis provides new insights into the Australian open knowledge landscape and ways of mapping different paths of OKIs.

Evaluating the impact of open access policies on research institutions

The proportion of research outputs published in open access journals or made available on other freely-accessible platforms has increased over the past two decades, driven largely by funder mandates, institutional policies, grass-roots advocacy, and changing attitudes in the research community. However, the relative effectiveness of these different interventions has remained largely unexplored. Here we present a robust, transparent and updateable method for analysing how these interventions affect the open access performance of individual institutes. We studied 1,207 institutions from across the world, and found that, in 2017, the top-performing universities published around 80-90% of their research open access. The analysis also showed that publisher-mediated (gold) open access was popular in Latin American and African universities, whereas the growth of open access in Europe and North America has mostly been driven by repositories.

Comparison of bibliographic data sources: Implications for the robustness of university rankings

Universities are increasingly evaluated on the basis of their outputs. These are often converted to simple and contested rankings with substantial implications for recruitment, income, and perceived prestige. Such evaluation usually relies on a single data source to define the set of outputs for a university. However, few studies have explored differences across data sources and their implications for metrics and rankings at the institutional scale. We address this gap by performing detailed bibliographic comparisons between Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, and Microsoft Academic (MSA) at the institutional level and supplement this with a manual analysis of 15 universities. We further construct two simple rankings based on citation count and open access status. Our results show that there are significant differences across databases. These differences contribute to drastic changes in rank positions of universities, which are most prevalent for non-English-speaking universities and those outside the top positions in international university rankings. Overall, MSA has greater coverage than Scopus and WoS, but with less complete affiliation metadata. We suggest that robust evaluation measures need to consider the effect of choice of data sources and recommend an approach where data from multiple sources is integrated to provide a more robust data set.