Leveraging open tools to realize the potential of self-archiving: A cohort study in clinical trials

Abstract

While Open Access (OA) is growing, many publications remain behind a paywall. This limits the impact of research and entrenches global inequalities by restricting access to knowledge to those that can afford it. Many journal policies allow researchers to make a version of their publication openly accessible through self-archiving in a repository, sometimes after an embargo period (green OA). Unpaywall and Shareyourpaper are open tools that help users find OA articles and support authors to legally self-archive their papers, respectively. This study leveraged these tools to assess the potential of green OA to increase discoverability in a cohort of clinical trial results publications from German university medical centers. Of the 1,897 publications in this cohort, 46% (n=871/1,897, 95% Confidence Interval (CI) 44% to 48%) were not openly accessible via a journal or a repository. Of these, 85% (n=736/871, 95% CI 82% to 87%) had a permission to self-archive the accepted or published version in an institutional repository. Thus, most of the closed-access clinical trial results in this cohort could be made openly accessible, in line with World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations. In addition to providing further evidence of the unrealized potential of green OA, this study demonstrates the use of open tools to obtain actionable information on self-archiving at scale, and empowers efforts to increase science discoverability.

Personal academic websites serving scholarly work purpose

“…As early as of 2001, Lawrence found an average 336% citation advantage to online articles compared to offline articles published in the same journal [23]. Yet, researchers continue to not "green" self-archive their own research papers even in Germany and even in fields such as medicine where anticipated knowledge sharing via openly accessible research papers and clinical trials can literally save lives [24].…”