Improvement of PKP's OJS installation statistics site (https://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/stats/)

Feature Requests
1

Describe the problem you would like to solve
In recent years, initiatives by university consortia, funders, or library consortia have been started to promote Diamond (or Platinum) Open Access publishing and create funding opportunities (e.g. the Swiss universities’ PLATO project). One part of these initiatives is to gather an overview of the journal landscape (existing journals and potential candidates) of a country. This is a tedious task because OJS installations are not only at universities, but may be scattered over learned societies, enterprises, commercial hosters or private installations for which it is difficult to find out whether they host an OJS instance.

PKP’s OJS usage statistics website https://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/stats/ already provides absolute numbers of journals per country, but currently no details. As PKP already seems to have the journal information via beacon (unique site ID and OAI base URL) and OAI-PMH, it could provide easily an aggregated list of running journals by country.

This would help to

  • obtain an overview of the OJS journals (whether OA or subscription) by country
  • identify the research fields and find gaps according to analysis of the journal names (task of the investigator)
  • identify growth of Diamond OA
  • identify journals that are discontinued

Similarly to OpenDOAR (https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/opendoar/) for repositories, the improved usage stats website would provide a centralized service that provides information on the landscape of OJS journals.

Describe the solution you’d like
One solution could be to make the map on https://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/stats/ clickable. Clicking a country yields a list of current journals (journal name, ISSN, URL) for corresponding year and country. Another solution could be to provide a dropdown menu with countries to create the list.

Who is asking for this feature?
Funding agencies, librarians, researchers in bibliometrics/science evaluation, researchers interested in OA publishing

Additional information
This is not a feature request for OJS itself, but for improvement of PKP’s website.

2

Hi @mpbraendle!

I guess this will be part of a second phase. For now it’s possible to grab the data from a dataset we’ve published here: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/OCZNVY.

p.s.: This dataset is supposed to be updated yearly, so it might be a little outdated for now.

Best,
Jonas

1 Like
3

Jonas is right, the dataset he linked to will be updated yearly (next update due in November if I recall correctly). This dataset has the OAI URLs for the journals, their titles, and ISSNs, as well as the country (see accompanying file in dataset for a description of how we determine country). It should be easy enough to download, filter by “active” status (we use >5 articles per year in recent years) and by country.

4

The dataset is fine, but for ease of use and quick lookup an interactive statistics website as proposed should also be available.

5

I like A LOT @mpbraendle proposal.

In past PKP offered a graphic bar and a map but at some moment the graphic disappear and now we only show the map…

Although @mpbraendle proposal goes further and will require a little bit more work I think will help a lot to show the OA evolution in the last decade as well as PKPs work to make it happen.

@jalperin some time ago in the beacon group you show some fancy graphics with beacon data disaggregated by regions. Why not use it as an starting point? Why not start with something little and then, if there are time, energy and resources, we make it grow?