Monitoring open access: analysing the content of the national portal NARCIS

In the context of monitoring open access to publications, DANS has again made an analysis of the publications in NARCIS from the repositories of Dutch universities.

The graphs can be found on the NARCIS portal. The first two graphs present the current content in NARCIS, and contain an overview of the number of open access publications and the number of open access articles in NARCIS, coming from 36 repositories of the universities and other Dutch research institutions. Since 2013 there has been an upward trend in the number of open access publications and the number of open access articles in NARCIS.

The other four graphs provide a snapshot (July 2018) of the contents of NARCIS with regard to the output of Dutch universities:

• Open access for different publication types:

Large differences can be seen per type. For example, over 28% of the scientific articles are open access available, and almost all, about 90%, of the theses.

• Open access for dissertations:

From comparison with the data from the VSNU, it appears that NARCIS gives access to nearly all dissertations in the Netherlands, of which the largest part is open access.

• Open access for articles, compared to national output:

It is difficult to compare the number of articles in NARCIS with the national output as known to the VSNU, because of deviations in the definition. It is estimated that NARCIS lacks a large number of articles, so it is not possible to indicate whether or not these missing articles are open access available elsewhere.

• Open access for articles, for different universities:

While for some universities the share of open access is increasing rapidly, this is stagnating (or even declining) for others. There are several possible explanations for these differences. On the one hand, these can be real differences between the universities, on the other hand differences can also be caused by deviation in registration and what universities can deliver to NARCIS.

NARCIS provides access to (open access) publications from the repositories of all Dutch universities, KNAW, NWO and various scientific institutions. A number of institutions have included all scientific publications in the repository, others only the open access publications.