Openness of Spanish scholarly journals as measured by access and rights (original) (raw)

Metrics regarding Open Access (OA) availability for readers and the enablers of redistribution of content published in scholarly journals, i.e. content licenses, copyright ownership, and publisher-stipulated self-archiving permissions are still scarce. This study implements the four core variables (reader rights, reuse rights, copyrights, author posting rights) of the recently published Open Access Spectrum (OAS) to measure the level of openness in all 1728 Spanish scholarly journals listed in the Spanish national DULCINEA database at the end of 2015. In order to conduct the analysis additional data has been aggregated from other bibliographic databases and through manual data collection (such data includes the journal research area, type of publisher, type of access, self-archiving and reuse policy, and potential type of Creative Commons (CC) licence used). 79% of journals allowed self-archiving in some form, 13.5% did not specify any copyright terms and 37% used CC licenses. From the total journals (1728), 1285 (74.5%) received the maximum score of 20 in reader rights. For 72% of journals, authors retain or publishers grant broad rights which include author reuse and authorisation rights (for others to re-use). The OAS-compliant results of this study enable comparative studies to be conducted on other large populations of journals. Key points  The Open Access Spectrum (OAS), and associated criteria of the Open Access Spectrum EvaluationTool, can be used to evaluate individual journals as well as to summarise the openness of a large number of journals.  The 1728 Spanish journals included in the study make use the entire scales of the four core OAS criteria.  55% of all Spanish journals publishing with a Creative Commons licence use CC-BY-NC-ND, which differs from the most frequent licence of used globally, CC-BY.  During the last two years Spanish journals have become increasingly open, both in relative share of full open access journals as well restricted access journals permitting self-archiving.  National-level indexes, like DULCINEA in Spain which implements SHERPA/RoMEO-compliant coding of publisher-policies, could be one way of solving the persistent problem of outdated self-archiving information.  We encourage actors overseeing multiple journals, publishers and national science policies, to make us of the the OAS as a tool for monitoring the development of openness among journals. INTRODUCCION Growth and increasing degree of openness in scholarly publishing Enabled by the shift to the digital medium, the global scholarly journal landscape has been undergoing four key intertwining shifts on a global scale. The first shift is related to growth of scholarly journal publishing overall. The volume