Tracking Open Access?
The Open Access Tracker is an online tool that helps document the growth of open access in six Mediterranean countries, namely Greece, Turkey, Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal (http://www.medoanet.eu/browse).It has been developed within the project MedOANet (Mediterranean Open Access Network www.medoanet.eu), a two-year project funded under the Science in Society Programme of the EC 7th Framework Programme and coordinated by the National Documentation Centre (EKT). MedOANet enhances existing policies, strategies and structures for Open Access and contributes towards the implementation of new ones in the aforementioned Mediterranean countries. The tool has been developed by CINECA, a MedOANet project partner based in Italy (http://www.cineca.it).
Currently, the Tracker draws information exclusively from authoritative international services such as DOAJ, SHERPA/RoMEO, SHERPA/Juliet, OpenDOAR, ROARMAP, through APIs (when available) or through ad hoc script programs. Once data are ingested, some cleaning and harmonization is performed to improve their quality. In this way, the Tracker maps the development of different types of Open Access activities and policies in numbers, effectively creating a profile for each country; it also visually presents the growth of these different types of Open Access activities and policies by country and by year, as recorded in these sources.
The Tracker is intended to encourage the stakeholder community to register its open access resources with these established services, in order to increase the accuracy of information regarding the state of open access in the six countries.
The Open Access Tracker in numbers
At the time of the writing of this article the Tracker records:
• More than 1160 Open Access Journals
• More than 300 Open Access repositories
• More than 200 publishers policies
• More than 70 institutional policies
• Nine funder policies
In short, why the Open Access Tracker?
• to highlight ongoing activities on Open Access with reference to journals, policies, publishers, institutional repositories, etc.
• to compare the trends in Open Access in the Mediterranean area
• have a real-time overview on Open Access in each and all six countries
• observe the yearly growth of the Open Access resources it Tracks
• to promote Open Access with facts and figures for advocacy and policy purposes
• to encourage registration of activities and policies with authoritative national and/or international directories
Current and future developments
In view of the enhancing the reliability of the Open Access Tracker, as well as that of the international sources from which it draws, an enrichment of the data it contains has been envisioned to be carried by national editors. These new data will be exposed for harvesting from various sources. In order to implement this service, which is under development, data ill be ingested from National authoritative sources (such as Recolecta for Spain, and RCAAP for Portugal). Other data ingestion and exchange from other types of international directories (for example information on existing CRIS or European projects) could be envisioned for future developments once they are in place.
The Open Access Tracker is available at http://www.medoanet.eu/open-access-tracker-information .
Any OpenAIRE country interested in developing or adopting a similar tool can contact the project team at info@medoanet.eu
