IMLS Indicators

Indicators For Open and Inclusive Scholarship

This project produces standardized indicators of who participates in open science and scholarly communications over time. It is lead by The Center for Research in Equitable and Open Scholarship, and funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services (grant #LG-250130-OLS-21)

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Upcoming Events

Sept 9, 2022. CREOS will be presenting an abstract of research on diversity and inclusion in editorial boards project at the 9th International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication.
Oct 29, 2022. CREOS will be presenting on project design at the 85th ASIST annual conference, in Pittsburgh, themed “Crisis, Transition, Resilience: Re-Imagining an Information-Resilient Society.

Presentations

June 1, 2022. Project plans presented at ACRL-NEC.
July 21, 2022. Project summary presented at MIT Libraries All-Staff Meeting.

Publications

Designing Community Tracking Indicators for Open and Inclusive Scholarship
(Forthcoming, Proceedings of the 85th ASIST Annual Conference)

There is evidence that scholarly processes have bias and create barriers to inclusion; more openness in scholarly communication is needed. Progress towards a better scholarly ecosystem requires comparable, reliable measures of the desired attributes of a better system. This paper describes an initiative in progress to produce standardized indicators that describe the volume and types of open science output systematically over time, using existing open data sources. We describe a replicable to clean, integrate, code, and analyze these sources to enable continuous publication of indicators. And we report on early results from this initiative, demonstrating how these indicators can go beyond ‘overall impact’ measures to advance the understanding of who is, and who is not, participating in open scholarship.

Openness and Diversity in Journal Editorial Boards
(SocArXiv Preprint)

Figure 6. Editor diversity by journal discipline and role.

This study aims to measure diversity in scholarly journals’ editorial board structure and characterize patterns of editorial diversity across types of journals. To accomplish these aims, we integrate multiple sources of data at the journal and editor level to assemble a novel database describing the composition of editors and editorial boards for more than six thousand journals internationally, characterized by discipline, commercial publishing model, and research transparency. We then apply name-based gender imputation, geo-entity extraction analysis, and standardized dispersion measures to evaluate each group’s diversity. This analysis reveals that editorial leadership is more homogenous than editorial boards, and that diversity across both boards and leadership varies substantially (and robustly) across disciplines. Open-access journals’ boards exhibit less gender diversity and more international diversity than their closed-access counterparts. These results also suggest that open access, open science, and diversity, and equity, and inclusion are not strongly correlated and thus require separate measurement.

Exploring the Public Evidence on Open Access Monographs
(White Paper)

In this white paper we look at the open data available on monograph publication, and use it to explore patterns and trends in open monograph publishing. This blog post takes the form of a guided, interactive, reproducible data analysis based on currently available public data. We aim for this exploration to inform libraries, publishers, and authors about the landscape, and prepare for future transitions to open access.

This paper is accompanied by an annotated bibliography.