A look at some recent Open Access datasets

  • Author By Eric Willey
  • May 16, 2022
Open Access symbol
One area of the publishing industry that has generated considerable discussion is article processing charges (APCs), fees paid by an author or their institution to a publisher to make their article Open Access.

Open Access is a frequent topic of our news items from the Scholarly Communication Team, not just for its own sake but for the ways it can open new avenues and methods of research for our faculty, students, and staff. Open Access (OA) books and journals are widely accessible, and the OA movement has grown to include datasets that scholars can use in their own original research and creative productivity.

For example, Sunyam Bagga and Andrew Piper recently released the HATHI 1M dataset, which was created from “1,671,370 randomly sampled pages of English-language prose roughly divided between modes of fictional and non-fictional writing and published between the years 1800 and 2000.” In addition to the pages, this dataset includes information about the publication the page is from, and 107 features.

At Curtin University, data scientists and software engineers have received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to “enhance the diversity of voices from small and medium book publishers across the globe.” While Open Access books and articles have fewer barriers to access than some other platforms, they do have some of the same problems in terms of some publishers having more resources to publicize their materials than others. This project will help address the growing analytics gap and ensure that the voices of authors in underserved populations using small or medium book publishers are not lost.

While some readers may be satisfied with the end product in shared data, others may wish to learn about the process of sharing and reusing research data itself. Fortunately, Charles W. Bailey, Jr. has published the Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography. The bibliography includes over 200 English-language books and articles published between 2009 and 2021, with direct links and abstracts where possible.

For more information on locating and creating Open Access datasets, contact Milner Library’s Data Services Librarian Chad Kahl at cmkahl@ilstu.edu. Anyone wishing to make their own materials (including datasets) more readily available can often place pre-prints or even published articles and materials on ISU ReD. We are happy to answer any questions you might have and discuss what options are available. If you wish to discuss this further, please contact Milner Library’s Scholarly Communication Team at isured@ilstu.edu.

Units

Milner Library, Scholarly Communication