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1. Conference Paper2026Open Access

   The effect of open access on numbers of downloads and their geographic diversity(opens in a new tab)

   

   van Bellen, Simon; Larivière, Vincent

   Despite their usefulness in analyzing the uses of research papers within and beyond academia, the availability of download data remains scarce. Using data from the Érudit journal platform, this paper analyzes the effect of open access availability on numbers of downloads and their geographic diversity. Results show that OA positively affects the numbers of downloads by a factor of 3.0 during the embargo period, and that downloads may maintain this advantage during the following years. Eighty percent of downloads originated from non-subscribing visitors, with the end of the embargo period being strongly associated with an expansion of their geographic diversity. On the whole, our results show that journals can substantially broaden international readership by adopting immediate OA, and that metadata quality is at least as influential as OA for downloads.

   DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22656606DownloadMetadataGeographic variationAudience measurementLocation
2. Working Paper2025Open Access

   The multiversatory: fostering diversity and inclusion in research information by means of a multiple-perspective observatory(opens in a new tab)

   

   Rafols, Ismael; Costas, Rodrigo; Bezuidenhout, Louise; Brasil, André

   For science and technology to contribute to social justice, scientometrics analyses need to be able to produce descriptions that are appropriate to specific contexts and values. Given that the participation of stakeholders in the analyses is crucial for these perspectives to be realized, this requires research information analyses that are “open”. In this paper, we propose that this “openness” in research information concerns several dimensions. In the first place, research information should be open in the sense of being transparent and accessible. Second, research information should be open in the sense of being inclusive and diverse, which includes two dimensions: that stakeholders can actually use it, and that the contents include different types of knowledge. Third, the research information should be provided in forms that empower interrogation by stakeholders, so that they can retrieve and construct the descriptions of science and technology that are more appropriate for their context. This last step implies efforts to make visible many scientific contributions from the global south which are currently invisible. We call this vision “the multiversatory”: an approach to the observation of science that facilitates pluralistic analyses of the knowledge created across a variety of places and contexts, the pluriverse.

   DOI: https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/dn2axdiversityevaluationinclusioninformationmonitoringobservatoryresearch