Open Access: A snapshot of the landscape in Australia & Aotearoa New Zealand in 2022

Open Access (OA) publication rates in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (ANZ) falls behind that of many countries. This poster will present the results of a recent Open Access Australasia (OAA) https://oaaustralasia.org/ project looking at OA initiatives undertaken at an institutional level across university, health, government and non-profit research active sectors. We investigated OA institutional practice in the form of policies, statements and guidelines; use of repositories; and publishing of open journals and books. To date there has not been a detailed investigation into OA practice in research institutions across the region that seeks to map this range of practice, draws comparison across sectors and surfaces the diversity of approaches to OA. This poster will also show an additional result of the study: the relationship between institutional OA practice and actual open research output using data from the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative https://openknowledge.community/. This poster will present results showing that the university sector has the greatest institutional practice of OA but the lowest overall rate of OA output and that across all sectors there is no obvious association between the number of institutional OA initiatives and the average rate of OA publications. It is also clear from our analysis that all sectors are practicing diverse and often overlapping ways of making their research open, which highlights the importance of maintaining health bibliodiversity in the publishing landscape.