Understanding differences of the OA uptake within the Germany university landscape (2010-2020) -- Part 2: repository-provided OA

TL;DR

This study analyzes the factors influencing Open Access repository uptake in German universities from 2010 to 2020, highlighting disciplinary profile as the key determinant and noting shifts in repository functions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive regression analysis of institutional and subject repository OA uptake factors, emphasizing the changing role of repositories in university landscapes.

Findings

Disciplinary profile is the most significant factor.

Local infrastructural support is non-significant.

Repositories are shifting from secondary publishing to metadata aggregation.

Abstract

This study investigates the determinants for the uptake of institutional and subject repository Open Access (OA) in the university landscape of Germany and considers three factors: the disciplinary profile of universities, their OA infrastructures and services and large transformative agreements. The uptake of OA as well as the determinants are measured by combining several data sources (incl. Web of Science, Unpaywall, an authority file of standardised German affiliation information, the ISSN-Gold-OA 4.0 list, and lists of publications covered by transformative agreements). For universities OA infrastructures and services, a structured data collection was created by harvesting different sources of information and by manual online search. To determine the explanatory power of the different factors, a series of regression analyses was performed for different periods and for both institutional as well as subject repository OA. As a result of the regression analyses, the most determining factor for the explanation of differences in the uptake of both repository OA-types turned out to be the disciplinary profile, whereas all variables that capture local infrastructural support and services for OA turned out to be non-significant. The outcome of the regression analyses is contextualised by an interview study conducted with 20 OA officers of German universities. The contextualisation provides hints that the original function of institutional repositories, offering a channel for secondary publishing is vanishing, while a new function of aggregation of metadata and full texts is becoming of increasing importance.