At first glance: Misleading figures – How Open Is the U15? A Preliminary Analysis of Open Access Publishing in Canadian Academic Libraries

When I first saw the article, How Open Is the U15? A Preliminary Analysis of Open Access Publishing in Canadian Academic Libraries, of course I had to see how MPOW, the University of Calgary, stacked up. We’ve long been a proponent of open access; we had the first open access author’s fund in Canada, established in 2008!

Imagine my dismay, then, to scroll through the figures to see that we were well below the national average in what this paper looked at, “a six-year span (2014–2019) of librarian-authored publications”. Some institutions were rocking 100%, and the UofC was barely above 70% 🙁

It’s not until you get past the article itself, and into the Appendices, that you learn how many articles from each institution are being examined, and then you realize how misleading the above figures are. I’m not picking on Montreal and Laval, but they jumped out with their 100% compliance and the fact that they were right next to each other, so were easy to highlight. Appendix 1 shows us the following:

None of this changes the findings that, “the data suggest that Canadian academic librarians are personally motivated to self-archive and make their research open.” And it’s a good article! I just wish U of Calgary didn’t look as bad as the tables made it appear. :-/

Tummon, N. & Desmeules, R., (2022) “How Open Is the U15? A Preliminary Analysis of Open Access Publishing in Canadian Academic Libraries”, Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication 10(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.13831