With the growing number of open access (OA) mandates, the accurate measurement of OA publishing is an important policy issue. Existing studies have provided estimates of the prevalence of OA publications ranging from 27.9% to 53.7%, depending on the data source and period of investigation. This paper aims at providing a comparison of the proportion of OA publishing as represented in two major bibliometric databases, Web of Science (WoS) and Dimensions, and assesses how the choice of database affects the measurement of OA across different countries. Results show that a higher proportion of publications indexed in Dimensions are OA than those indexed by WoS, and that this is particularly true for publications originating from outside North America and Europe. The paper concludes with a discussion of the cause and consequences of these differences, motivating the use of more inclusive databases when examining OA, especially for publications originating beyond North America and Europe.

Open Access (OA) dissemination has been gaining a lot of momentum over the last decade, thanks to the implementation of several OA policies by funders and institutions, as well as the development of several new platforms that facilitate the publication of OA content at low or no cost. Studies have shown that nearly half of the contemporary scientific literature could be available online for free. However, few studies have compared the use of OA literature across countries. This study aims to provide a global picture of OA adoption by countries, using two indicators: publications in OA and references made to articles in OA. We find that, on average, low-income countries are publishing and citing OA at the highest rate, while upper middle-income countries and higher-income countries publish and cite OA articles at below world-average rates. These results highlight national differences in OA uptake and suggest that more OA initiatives at the institutional, national, and international levels are needed to support wider adoption of open scholarship.

This study estimates fees paid for gold and hybrid open access articles in journals published by the oligopoly of academic publishers, which acknowledge funding from the Canadian Tri-Agency. It employs bibliometric methods using data from Web of Science, Unpaywall, open datasets of article processing charges list prices as well as historical fees retrieved via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine for journals published by Elsevier, Springer-Nature, Wiley, Sage and Taylor & Francis to estimate article processing charges for open access articles published between 2015 and 2018 that acknowledge funding from the Canadian Federal funding agencies CIHR, NSERC, and SSHRC, as well as grants jointly administered by the Tri-Agency. During the four-year period analyzed, a total of 6,892 gold and 4,097 hybrid articles that acknowledge Tri-Agency funding were identified, for which the total list prices amount to $US 27.6 million.

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The question about the cost of access to scholarly resources is usually answered by focusing on subscription cost. This study highlights the article processing charges (APCs) paid by Canada’s research institution as an additional scholarly resource. Unpaywall database was queried with the DOIs of CARL member universities’ publication indexed in the Web of Science. We find that while Open Access should in principle reduce the cost of access to scholarly literature, we are rather in a situation where both the cost of access and the cost of publishing are increasing simultaneously.

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This work-in-progress paper aims to map the scholarship produced by the eight Canadian Library and Information Science (LIS) schools. After using the citation network to divide publications into several research areas, we analyze how the research output of different LIS schools is distributed across these areas, in an attempt to shed light on the schools’ specificities and commonalities and how each school contributes to the global picture of Canadian LIS research.