elag draft

submitted to ELAG Workshop Title: Hacking article processing charges

Name: Najko Jahn, Bielefeld University Library najko.jahn@uni-bielefeld.de

Audience:

Any programming experience is recommended, but not required. Participants are encouraged to bring a Laptop with VirtualBox installed with them.

Short description (up to 250 words):

Managing article processing charges (APC) is an emerging task for libraries. Beyond financial contributions, they are faced with the increasing demand from researchers, funders and society to contribute to market transparency for Open Access publishing. This can be achieved by releasing data on charges paid by the library as Open Data.

After a short introduction to fee-based Open Access and the role of libraries, participants will set up a data pipeline for making reporting on APC paid transparent and reproducible. We will look how much information from bibliographic sources can be re-used to create normalized reports on total expenditure on APC. Based on this data, analytic steps will be implemented in R and dynamic reports will be generated with pandoc. However, participants are strongly encouraged to contribute their programming experiences and tools.

As dataset, we will re-use "Fees paid by German Research Institutions", comprising metadata on 1,600 articles with total expenditure of 2 million EURO. The dataset provides disambiguated data elements for monitoring APC expenditure across institutions per article and can be downloaded here: https://github.com/OpenAPC/openapc-de

Workshop outcomes:

Participants will gain a first understanding of how to collect, process and disseminate APCs paid as Open Data. They will discuss useful tools and will learn to report on APCs so that it is re-usable by others.