AN OVERVIEW OF OPEN ACCESS POLICY AND SELF-ARCHIVING UPTAKE IN THE GEOSCIENCES

In today’s changing information landscape, Open Access plays a larger role than ever in the dissemination of new research. Along with the rise of so-called gold Open Access (OA) journals, traditional subscription-based geoscience journals almost uniformly make allowances for green OA. Green OA makes research articles freely available by self-archiving a copy via institutional/disciplinary repositories or author websites. While the publishing policy barriers to green OA are lower than ever, still only a minority of researchers take advantage of the option to self-archive their articles. This poster will explore the rates of green OA uptake among geosciences articles published in the last three years, and factors that might influence the rate of uptake (including the presence of so-called bronze OA availability in online journals.)

Research into this topic has traditionally rarely explored the variations of self-archiving between STEM disciplines, and what research exists suggests that geosciences has traditionally had a lower rate of uptake compared to other STEM disciplines like physics. Is this still the case in 2021?

Understanding the rate of self-archiving uptake in the Geosciences and the factors influencing uptake of Green OA can serve to inform librarians’ practice in OA outreach and collection building.