Cassidy Sugimoto, Tom and Marie Patton School Chair in the School of Public Policy, co-authored an article in PLOS One. The piece is titled “The Effect of Data Sources on the Measurement of Open Access: A Comparison of Dimensions and the Web of Science.”

In it, Sugimoto and her co-authors compare the proportion of open access (OA) articles in two major bibliometric databases, Web of Science and Dimensions. From there, they look to see how the choice of database influences how the number of open access articles is measured across different countries.

They find that Dimensions registers a higher percentage of OA articles than Web of Science, especially for articles originating outside of North America and Europe. They argue that this is potentially due to Dimensions including more small national journals in its collection.

“Our analysis shows that the measurement of OA may differ significantly when one looks beyond the subset of most cited journals,” the authors write. “Ultimately, given that Dimensions indexes journals published by the many platforms developed in the South… it has the potential to be a more suitable platform for a more inclusive measurement of OA uptake, especially of publications by authors from outside North America, Europe, and Central Asia.”

Read the full article at https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265545.