Resources to investigate the 'openness' of Paleontological research.

The idea of this project is to perform a range of meta-analyses into the published Palaeontology literature. This will include looking at factors such as:

• Quantitative analysis of the 'openness' of Palaeontology research.
• Citation frequences for different journals, compared to their impact factors.
• How aware researchers are that they may have signed away copyright.

We strongly encourage others to participate in the project, propose their own ideas, and to contribute or re-use any of the data or other information available here.

Ultimately, this information might prove useful in developing standards, protocols, and best practices for palaeontological research and publishing.

Journal selection was for the top-20 cited Paleontology journals according to Google Scholar.

Metadata were extracted from Scopus journal-by-journal (as csv files), with the only filter being on the dates, constrained to published articles between 2015-2016. This includes information such as:

• Authors, titles, and year of publication.
• Number of citations (according to Scopus).
• Article Digital Object Identifier (DOI).

Note that there was an issue here with encoding of the csv exports from Scopus. This displaced some of the cells when viewed in Excel, so the delimiting was fixed for each file were needed to realign the cells properly. This was done simply be converting them to text, opening back up in Excel, specfying explicitly that commas were the delimiter and using UTF-8 encoding. After this, the files could be re-saved in csv format as needed.

For Acta Palaeontological Polonica, this was not entirely resolved, and two lines of fragmented entries were removed prior to subsequent analysis.

Data for PLOS ONE were obtained using the Rplos package in R. The code, resulting data, and Unpaywall query results can all be found here. Note that some of the data here are different to that obtained to Scopus queries.

The next phase is to use the Unpaywall DOI checker on the DOI list for each journal. This provides information such as:

• The Open Access state (true or false)
• Publication date
• Source of evidence for Open Access status

All of the results of these steps are available within this repository.

These data will be supplemented by conducting an author survey, built in Google Forms. Suggestions for this survey will be supplemented using an open system through GitHub here.

Corresponding author addresses were obtained from Scopus correspondence address metadata. Here, they were extracted simply by setting : as the delimiter to separate the emails from the rest of the address, and added as a new column. Much of the email data were incomplete, and therefore required manual checks of the relevant literature to acquire.

The following aspects will be looked at, where applicable.

• Open Access status
• Article Processing Charge
• If a self-archived version is available
• Article license
• Code availabaility and license
• Data availabilty and license
• Whether a new taxon was named
• Whether new taxa have relevant PIDs (e.g., via ZooBank)
• Whether specimens analysed are archived in a public reposiitory/museum
• What the copyright status of articles is

Results will be reported anonymously, and available for inspection and reuse.

The intention is to port this project into the Open Science Framework, and then to paleorXiv as a preprint submission. Whether or not it will be submitted to a peer reviewed journal is unknown for now.

The journal selection choice explicitly excludes some multi-disciplinary Open Access journals such as PeerJ and Scientific Reports, which palaeontologists also frequently publish in.

Palaeontologica Electronica does not provide DOIs for published articles. However, it is a fully Open Access journal, and therefore cross-checking the data with Unpaywall would be redundant in this case.