Rich metadata ensure that open access (OA) articles can be found and reused. To manage OA publication fees and negotiate transformative agreements, it is therefore crucial to monitor metadata compliance (Borrego et al., 2020; Geschuhn & Stone, 2017; Marques et al., 2019).
metacheck lets you automatically check the quality of publisher-provided metadata for OA journal articles. The tool mainly targets libraries and consortia that manage OA publishing funds and negotiate transformative agreements.
metacheck focuses on DOIs from the registration agency Crossref. Crossref is used by all major publishers (Hendricks et al., 2020). As a consequence, Crossref is a key data source for leading open access discovery services like Unpaywall (Piwowar et al., 2018) and open access transparency initiatives like Open APC (Jahn & Tullney, 2016; Pieper & Broschinski, 2018).
metacheck uses Crossref Metadata Plus. A service-level agreement ensures performant access to the Crossref REST API.
For more details on compliance checking of licensing information in Crossref in the context of OA transformative agreements, see Voigt (2020).
Metacheck supports your workflows to check OA metadata deposited by publishers, but it cannot conclusively check funding eligibility of OA publications. Please consult the funding conditions of the respective funder.
You have provided 284 DOIs.
We first check whether these DOIs could have compliant open access metadata. DOIs that do not meet one or more of following criteria are excluded from the below analysis.
not_missing: DOIs must not be missing values. (0 dropped.)unique: DOIs must be unique. (0 dropped.)within_limits: Number of DOIs must be within the allowed limit. (0 dropped.)doi_org_found: DOIs must be resolveable on DOI.org. (0 dropped.)from_cr: DOIs must have been registered by the Crossref registration agency (RA). (0 dropped.)cr_md: DOIs must have metadata on Crossref. (0 dropped.)article: DOIs must resolve to a journal article. (0 dropped.)The following analysis covers only the remaining 284 DOIs.
The below table summarises the test results.
| Article | Share | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| CC License | 284 | 100% | |
| Compliant CC | 213 | 75% | |
| TDM Support | 133 | 47% | |
| Funder info | 188 | 66% | |
| ORCID | 200 | 70% | |
| Open Abstracts | 231 | 81% | |
| Open Citations | 275 | 97% |
The table shows absolute counts and relative shares.
Tests include:
Below are the results for each test in greater detail.
Open content licenses are essential to govern access and re-use to open access journal articles.
metacheck normalizes Creative Commons licenses and maps them to the different variants in use such as CC BY. We also check if license statements are compliant.
The below table shows the number and percentage by Creative Commons variant.
| Article | Share | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| by | 253 | 89% | |
| by-nc | 25 | 9% | |
| by-nc-nd | 4 | 1% | |
| by-sa | 2 | 1% |
Many research funders recommend CC-BY, in particular those supporting the Plan S Principles. NA indicates articles where no licence metadata was found.
The below table displays the number and percentage of articles with compliant license metadata.
| Article | Share | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| All fine! | 213 | 75% | |
| Difference between publication date and the CC license's start_date suggests delayed OA provision | 65 | 23% | |
| No Creative Commons license metadata found for version of record | 6 | 2% |
We consider license metadata as compliant, if and only if:
We noted that while more and more publishers do provide Creative Commons license metadata through Crossref, some metadata is still incomplete. This can negatively affect the discovery and re-use of open access articles. If you observe license metadata issues, we strongly encourage you to contact the publisher
The below table summarises which (MIME Type) file formats are supported for text and data mining (TDM).
| Article | Share | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| application/pdf | 130 | 46% | |
| application/xml | 14 | 5% | |
| text/html | 115 | 40% | |
| text/plain | 3 | 1% | |
| text/xml | 3 | 1% | |
| No TDM links for version-of-records | 151 | 53% |
Crossref metadata can include more than one format for each DOI. Therefore, percentages can add to more than 100%.
We recommend that publishers do not only provide PDF files for TDM purposes, but also XML to promote automated re-use.
The funding context of research articles becomes more and more important in open access monitoring. A growing number of publishers use Crossref to share such information.
The below table displays the share of DOIs with such funding information, along with the three most frequent funders among the DOIs submitted. Crossref metadata can include more than one funder for each DOI.
| Article | Share | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft | 94 | 33% | |
| Technische Universität Berlin | 30 | 11% | |
| Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung | 12 | 4% | |
| Other funders | 100 | 35% | |
| No funding info | 96 | 34% |
Here again, Crossref metadata can include more than one funder for each DOI, and the percentages can add to more than 100%.
Please note that due to the (still) limited coverage of Crossref, results may not be suitable to comprehensively analyse funding contexts of a publication.
Borrego, Á., Anglada, L., & Abadal, E. (2020). Transformative agreements: Do they pave the way to open access? Learned Publishing, 34(2), 216–232. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1347
Geschuhn, K., & Stone, G. (2017). It’s the workflows, stupid! What is required to make “offsetting” work for the open access transition. Insights the UKSG Journal, 30(3), 103–114. https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.391
Hendricks, G., Tkaczyk, D., Lin, J., & Feeney, P. (2020). Crossref: The sustainable source of community-owned scholarly metadata. Quantitative Science Studies, 1(1), 414–427. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00022
Jahn, N., & Tullney, M. (2016). A study of institutional spending on open access publication fees in Germany. PeerJ, 4, e2323. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.2323
Marques, M., Woutersen-Windhouwer, S., & Tuuliniemi, A. (2019). Monitoring agreements with open access elements: Why article-level metadata are important. Insights the UKSG Journal, 32. https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.489
Pieper, D., & Broschinski, C. (2018). OpenAPC: A contribution to a transparent and reproducible monitoring of fee-based open access publishing across institutions and nations. Insights the UKSG Journal, 31. https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.439
Piwowar, H., Priem, J., Larivière, V., Alperin, J. P., Matthias, L., Norlander, B., Farley, A., West, J., & Haustein, S. (2018). The state of OA: A large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of open access articles. PeerJ, 6, e4375. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4375
Voigt, M. (2020). DEAL Open-Access-Option optimal nutzen: Ein Bibliothekspraxisbericht. LIBREAS. Library Ideas, 38. https://libreas.eu/ausgabe38/voigt/