Dataset for Earth Sciences at Freie Universität Berlin: Open Access, Licenses and Persistent Identifiers Monitoring

In Version 3, new entries have been added for both journal and non-journal article outputs, specifically including data from the year 2023. Minor adjustments were also made to URLs and open access (OA) statuses.

Note: Data for journal and non-journal article outputs from the year 2023 were unavailable at the time of preparing the short paper presenting the results, findable under 10.5281/zenodo.14170751 [1]).

Started in 2021, Berlin University Alliance (BUA) Open Science Dashboards, followed by the BUA Open Science Magnifiers projects, seek to investigate Open Science (OS) practices across different research domains and communities. A primary focus of these initiatives lies in the development of OS indicators, tailored to discipline specific ones, alongside their visualisation for monitoring.

Collaborating closely with the Department of Earth Sciences at Freie Universität Berlin (FU), one of the project's key objectives is the implementation of an Open Science Dashboard for Earth Sciences FU. The visualisation of the first OS metrics is already available under https://quest-open-earthsciences.charite.de/.

The datasets utilized include the outputs from the Department of Earth Sciences at FU, i.a. on Open Access (OA) categorisations and statuses, persistent identifiers (PIDs) and Open Licences (Creative Commons) availability, published between 2016-2023. These datasets consist of (i) "journal_articles_v3.csv" and (ii) "non_journal_articles_outputs_v3.csv", the latter including “book”, “book chapter”, “conference paper”, “conference abstract”, and “other research outputs” (e.g. book reviews, project reports, book chapters in school books, or electronic supplementary material).

Data for the dashboard was obtained from the FU university bibliography (https://frub-berlin.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/), but coverage of PID information was incomplete, OA category information was incomplete and often erroneous, and copyright/open licence information was missing in this data set. Therefore, the data set was enriched with manually researched information. Data enrichment was different for journal articles and for non-journal-article publications. For journal articles, copyright/open licence information was added, and open access category information was checked and added or corrected. For non-journal-article outputs, missing PIDs were added and open access category information was checked and added or corrected. 

The "data_dictionary_earth_sciences_v3.csv" table documents all variables of each data file containing here.

Both for the dashboard, and in our following publications, we categorized "bronze" OA outputs as closed access. Although such publications are openly available on the publisher's websites, they lack licence information and thus cannot be openly reused, and presumably even change its openness status at any time. Following the methodology of Charité Dashboard on Responsible Research (https://quest-dashboard.charite.de/#tabStart) we only include "gold", "hybrid" and "green" OA as true OA. Further details about the enrichment process conducted on these datasets can be found under 10.5281/zenodo.10998219 [2]

[1] Duine, M., Iarkaeva, A., & Hübner, A. (2024, November 15). Initiating discipline-specific Open Science Monitoring with the Open Science Dashboard for Earth Sciences. 28th International Conference on Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators (STI2024), Berlin, Germany. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14170751
[2] Duine, M., Hübner, A., & Iarkaeva, A. (2024). Enrichment of university bibliography data for open science monitoring. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10998219