Usage Trends of Open Access and Local Journals: A Korean Case Study

Abstract

Articles from open access and local journals are important resources for research in Korea and the usage trends of these articles are important indicators for the assessment of the current research practice. We analyzed an institutional collection of published papers from 1998 to 2014 authored by researchers from Seoul National University, and their references from papers published between 1998 and 2011. The published papers were collected from Web of Science or Scopus and were analyzed according to the proportion of articles from open access journals. Their cited references from published papers in Web of Science were analyzed according to the proportion of local (South Korean) or open access journals. The proportion of open access papers was relatively stable until 2006 (2.5 ~ 5.2% in Web of Science and 2.7 ~ 4.2% in Scopus), but then increased to 15.9% (Web of Science) or 18.5% (Scopus) in 2014. We analyzed 2,750,485 cited references from 52,295 published papers. We found that the overall proportion of cited articles from local journals was 1.8% and that for open access journals was 3.0%. Citations of open access articles have increased since 2006 to 4.1% in 2011, although the increase in open access article citations was less than for open access publications. The proportion of citations from local journals was even lower. We think that the publishing / citing mismatch is a term to describe this difference, which is an issue at Seoul National University, where the number of published papers at open access or local journals is increasing but the number of citations is not. The cause of this discrepancy is multi-factorial but the governmental / institutional policies, social / cultural issues and authors' citing behaviors will explain the mismatch. However, additional measures are also necessary, such as the development of an institutional citation database and improved search capabilities with respect to local and open access documents.

Equality, equity, and reality of open access on scholarly information

“…We could also find the issue of equity issue for local researchers on their access to the scholarly information. One recent study disclosed that we, authors at Seoul National University, published more in the OA journals than the global average but the citing references in our papers was much lower for OA journals than conventional subscription journals [12].…”

“…The non-OA articles are still a majority of the literature for research scientists. The current OA movement alone was not successful to convert the existing subscription-based to OA journals [2,12].…”

“…The promotion on the local journals published by local scientific societies is a major source of the dilemma in many Asian countries. Expansion of journals and articles in international journals both by OA and subscription type journals is one major cause of difficulties by editors of local journals [12,13]. More practical issue for most libraries lies on the budget for the subscription of serials.…”

Predatory Publishing Is a Threat to Non-Mainstream Science

“…To further improve visibility of their biomedical papers, Croatian experts encourage archiving of all local research in a country-based repository. A study of papers published by researchers from Seoul National University also revealed a growing popularity of open access with the proportion of their open access papers indexed by Scopus increasing from 4.2% in 2006 to 18.5% in 2014 and a doubling of references to openly available Korean medical sources (3% in 2008 and 6% in 2011) (18). …”

Equality, equity, and reality of open access on scholarly information

“…Быстро растущие расходы на подписку научных журналов -это явная проблема, но есть и несколько скрытых проблем: оплата подготовки статей (article processing charges -APС), расходы на монографии, невозможность расчета бюджетных планов на будущее. Одно недавнее исследование показало, что мы, ученые Сеульского национального университета, издали в журналах открытого доступа больше публикаций, чем в среднем издается по миру, однако показатели цитирования наших статей были гораздо ниже в журналах открытого доступа, чем в обычных журналах закрытого доступа [12].…”