Data Submission Handout

Minimal requirements

• The data contains an academic institution's expenditures on a per-article basis for publishing in fee-based Open Access journals
• The data should be made available in a machine-readable, platform independent format (CSV).
• The data is provided under an Open Data Commons license to ensure public access and reusability.
• A contact person is designated at the contributing institution.

Data set

The complete OpenAPC data set is composed of all the contributing institutions' distributed tables. Journal titles and publisher names are imported from CrossRef via automated enrichment routines to make expenditures comparable. Additional metadata is collected from services like Europe PubMed Central or the DOAJ.

To maintain comparability, OpenAPC only accepts APC expenditures paid for journal articles, other publication types like book chapters or conference proceedings are excluded from the data set.

The data is made available on GitHub.

Data schema

Every schema field is represented by a table column and every article conforms to a single table row.

The OpenAPC data schema is described here. This contribution from Leipzig University is an example of a table which conforms to the schema.

Mandatory fields

These variables must be present in every contribution:

institution — Top-level organisation which covered the fee

period — Year of APC payment

euro — The final amount that was paid in Euro, including VAT and all additional fees.

doi — Digital Object Identifier

is_hybrid — Should be TRUE if the article was published in a subscription-based Journal ('hybrid journal'), FALSE if the journal was fully Open Access.

Optional fields

If the article does not have a DOI assigned, these 4 fields have to be given as well:

publisher — The publisher

journal_full_title — Title of the journal

issn — International Standard Serial Number

url — A URL linking to the article full text

Definition of costs

The amount reported in the euro field should be calclulated according to the following policy:

• All reported publication fees are gross values, modifiers like taxes or discounts should be included into the amount. The OpenAPC dataset does not explicitly track special reasons which might influence prices. However, institutions are encouraged to report details on such circumstances in a README file which can be added to their individual data folders (Example).
• Only the APC itself should be reported, no additional matters of expense like page/colour charges or submission fees.
• Only articles which conform to a "standard" model of APC transactions should be reported (Direct payment of money for OA publication). If the cost was calculated in hindsight only (because the article was published under an offsetting contract oder paid for with vouchers like in the RSC "Gold for gold" program), it should not be reported.
• The article cost should not be zero.

As the field name implies, the currency of the reported amount should be Euro (€). If your institution's accounting is based on another currency you can either convert the values yourself (preferable) or add the denomination and leave the process to us. However, in this case results might be slightly inaccurate as we will have to work with average exchange rates for the reported period. If you have information on the exact date of payment for each article you might want to add this information to the period column (YYYY-MM-DD) instead of just the year so we can apply exchange rates on a daily basis.

Submission

There are two ways to provide OpenAPC with your data:

1. By sending a mail to openapc at uni-bielefeld.de
2. By initiating a pull request on GitHub. This process works as follows:

GitHub workflow: Adding a new institution

The following steps are required if an institution wants to add data for the first time:

1. Register a user account on GitHub (if you don't have one already)
2. Create a fork of the original OpenAPC repository
3. Clone the fork on your local machine
4. Create a new folder for your institution in the data directory
5. Copy the data you want to add (tables, README) into the folder
6. Push your changes back to GitHub
7. Create a pull request and wait for the OpenAPC maintainer to accept it.

Steps 3 — 6 can be executed on your machine as follows (requires a command line environment and a git client):

Create local clone:

$ git clone https://github.com/YOURUsername/openapc-de.git

Add a new institutional folder:

$ cd openapc-de/data
$ mkdir YOURfolder

Add your csv-table(s) and an optional README file to the folder:

$ cp YOURdata.csv openapc-de/data/YOURfolder

Add/commit the data and push it back to GitHub:

$ git add openapc-de/data/YOURfolder/
$ git commit -m "APC fees paid at my Institution from 2012 until 2014"
$ git push origin master

Finally create a pull request to make it possible for OpenAPC to include your new data.

GitHub workflow: Updating your data

The following steps are required to add or update data:

1. Sync your fork and your local repository to mirror the current state of the OpenAPC repository (details)
2. Make changes to the content of your institutional data folder
3. Add, commit and push your changes back to GitHub
4. Create a pull request and wait for the OpenAPC maintainer to accept it.

Enrichment

After receiving your files (Either by pull request or by mail), OpenAPC will normalise your data and enrich it. For every contributed data file an enriched version will be created and added to your data folder, usually marked by adding an _enriched suffix to the file name. The enriched data will then be integrated into the OpenAPC core data set, increasing its revision number.

The enrichment process consists of the following steps:

• Journal and publisher names, ISSNs and license information are imported from CrossRef
• PMID and PMCID are imported from Europe PubMed Central
• The article is looked up in Web of Science, if found, the WoS identifier ut is stored
• The journal is looked up in the DOAJ
• A possible Linking ISSN (ISSN-l) is added

License

At the moment the following license is applied to all OpenAPC data:

Datasets are made available under the Open Database License: http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1.0/. Any rights in individual contents of the database are licensed under the Database Contents License: http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/dbcl/1.0/

Contributors

All contributors to OpenAPC will be mentioned by name.

Reuse

In addition to the dynamically generated repository front page (based on R Markdown) OpenAPC also operates an OLAP server for advanced data querying and a site providing treemap visualisations of the OpenAPC data.