COKI 2022 Update Newsletter

Katie Wilson and the COKI team, pdf available here

2022 Highlights

• The COKI Open Access Dashboard Launch. In 2022 COKI launched a powerful new open access dashboard that makes it possible to engage with data about open access publications by region, country and institution.
• The Mellon Foundation funded project Developing a Pilot Data Trust for Open Access Ebook Usage (January 2020 to March 2022) was delivered in March 2022, and led directly into the commencement of the COARD and Mellon Foundation funded project OA Book Usage Analytics for Diverse Communities – A Demonstration Project (April 2022 to April 2025). Building upon the success of the OAeBU project which delivered a series of pilot dashboards investigating usage of Open Access eBooks for 6 initial project partners, the Book Analytics Dashboard (BAD) Project will focus on creating a sustainable OA Book focused analytics service by scaling workflows, infrastructure and customer support and developing a long-term plan for housing, maintenance and funding of the analytics service as a sustainable community infrastructure.
• A focus on the role of diversity in understanding and evaluating knowledge production and impact. We investigated dimensions of diversity in global institutional workforces, and explored the role of open access in changing the narrative of gender imbalance in research performance, production and output. Our analysis of citations to research outputs identifies a strong association between open access and a diversity of citation sources by institutions, countries, subregions, regions and fields of research, indicating the strength of open access in expanding the reach of research. Analysis of languages used in scholarly publications reveals diversity in open access practices in non-English languages and regions. 
• We launched the first annual report on the Global State of Open Access for 2021.
• Our co-authored open access book Open Knowledge Institutions: Reinventing Universities, MIT Press, reached number 6 in The Australian newspaper’s top 10 books by Australian academics for 2022.

 

People

New Appointments

Dr Julian Tonti-Filippini

Julian joined the COKI team as a Senior Data Scientist in January 2022. With a background in computational biology, Julian brings expertise in full-stack software development, data engineering, systems architecture, and bioinformatics. Julian is currently leading research and development in the Research Impact and Evaluation System.

Keegan Smith

Keegan joined the COKI team as a Developer in May 2022. With a background in astrophysics, Keegan brings expertise in software development and problem solving skills to the COKI team, contributing to the COKI technical infrastructure that build the COKI datasets as well as leading software development for the Book Analytics Dashboard project.

Alex Massen-Hane

Alex joined the COKI team as a Developer in July 2022. With a background in physics and data science, IT support and deployment. Alex brings expertise in software development, high performance computing and data science to the COKI team. Alex is currently contributing to the continued development of the COKI Open Access dashboard, developing new features and improvements as well contributing to the COKI technical infrastructure.

Departures

We said farewell to Senior Data Scientists Dr Rebecca Lange (January 2022) and Dr Rafiq Mohammed (January 2022), Research Fellow Dr Alkim Ozaygen (March 2022) and Developer Aniek Roelofs (July 2022). Thank you all for your fantastic contributions to the COKI team over the past few years!

 

Outputs

Publications and editing

Huang, Chun-Kai (Karl), Neylon, Cameron, Montgomery, Lucy, Hosking, Richard, Diprose, James P., Handcock, Rebecca N., & Wilson, Katie. (2022). Open Access Research Outputs Receive More Diverse Citations (Version 2). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7099438

Wilson, K., Neylon, C., Montgomery, L., Huang, C.-K. (Karl), Handcock, R. N., Roelofs, A., Hosking, R., & Ozaygen, A. (2022). Global Diversity in Higher Education Workforces: Towards Openness. Open Library of Humanities, 8(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.4809

Wilson K, Huang C-K, Montgomery L, Neylon C, Handcock RN, Ozaygen A, Roelofs A. 2022 Changing the academic gender narrative through open access. Publications, 10(3): 22. https://doi.org/10.3390/publications10030022 

Wilson, K., Montgomery, L., Neylon, C., Huang, C.-K. (Karl), & Handcock, R. N. (2022). The Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative: Sharing data on scholarly research performance. LIBER Quarterly: The Journal of the Association of European Research Libraries, 32(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.53377/lq.11544

Katie Wilson co-edited a special issue of Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analysis | Scholarly Communication which explores the state of open science, open data and open access across Africa.

Lucy Montgomery, Katie Wilson and Karl Huang are co-editors of a special issue of the journal Publications exploring issues of Open Access and Equity, Justice and Diversity.

 

Dashboards

Jamie Diprose led the development of the latest public COKI Open access dashboard which went live in April 2022.The dashboard displays open access performance for 189 countries and 7715 institutions. This includes countries having at least 31 research outputs and institutions with at least 350 research outputs. Filter by region, country, or institution to display output counts, number and percentage of accessible outputs (publisher and other platform open, both and closed) published between 2000 and 2021. The COKI Open Access Dataset is created with the COKI Academic Observatory data collection pipeline which fetches data about research publications from multiple sources, synthesises the datasets and creates the open access calculations for each country and institution. The code for this website is available at the COKI Open Access Website Github project. The COKI Open Access Dataset is created with the COKI Academic Observatory data collection pipeline which fetches data about research publications from multiple sources, synthesises the datasets and creates the open access calculations for each country and institution. The code for this website is available at the COKI Open Access Website Github project.

Topic or subject focused dashboards developed in 2022 include

• a prototype of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander research publications for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS). 
• Climate change research Cameron Neylon and Bianca Kramer analysed the references in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Groups 1 and 2 contributions to the Sixth Assessment Report to determine the open accessibility of material cited in the reports.

Language diversity in scholarly publishing. Jamie Diprose, Cameron Neylon and Bianca Kramer mapped and analysed 122 million CrossRef objects up to the end of May 2022 to languages (based on titles and abstracts, where available).  English dominates the scholarly literature followed by German, French, with Spanish and Portuguese growing, and Bahasa Indonesian as the next largest language. Although outputs in languages other than English are a small proportion, the analysis reveals diversity of open access practices and differences in categorisation in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and Indonesia.