Towards a plan S gap analysis: open access potential across disciplines using Web of Science and DOAJ

Dataset accompanying two blogposts: 

https://101innovations.wordpress.com/2018/12/05/oa-potential-journals-and-publications-across-disciplines/

https://101innovations.wordpress.com/2018/12/05/gold-oa-journals-in-wos-and-doaj/

In the proposed implementation guidelines for Plan S, it has become clear there will be, for the coming years at least, three ways to open access (OA) that are compliant with Plan S:

• publication in full open access journals and platforms
• deposit in open access repositories of author accepted manuscript (AAM) or publisher version (VOR)
• publishing in hybrid journals that are part of transformative agreements

Additional requirements concern copyright (copyright retention by authors or institutions), licensing (CC-BY, CC-BY-SA or CC0), embargo periods (no embargo's) and technical requirements for open access journals, platforms and repositories.

To get a first indication as to what that potential for open access is across different disciplines, we looked at a particular subset of journals, namely those in Web of Science. For a number of (sub)disciplines, we identified the proportion of full gold, hybrid and closed journals in Web of Science, as well as the proportion of hybrid and closed journals that allows green open access by archiving AAM/VOR in repositories.  We also looked at the number of publications from 2017 (articles & reviews) that were actually made open access (or not) under each of these models.

We fully acknowledge the practical decision toi use Web of Science leads to limitation and bias in the results. In particular this concerns a bias against:

• recently launched journals
• non-traditional journal types
• smaller journals not (yet) meeting the technical requirements of WoS
• journals in languages other than English
• journals from non-Western regions

To further explore this bias, and give context to the interpretation of results derived from looking at full gold OA journals in Web of Science only, we analyzed the inclusion of DOAJ journals in WoS per major discipline.

We also looked at the proportion of DOAJ journals (and articles/reviews therein) in different parts of the Web of Science Core Collection that we used: either in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) / Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) /Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), or in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI).