The Virgen Macarena Hospital’s research output in the Andalusia Health Institutional Repository

Abstract

Introduction: The Health Institutional Repository is intended to gather the open access research output from the Andalusia Public Health System. Even though a national law requires the deposit of published research outcomes funded with public money, there is no institutional policy for other published documents. Knowing exactly how many articles can be submitted to the Repository in any of their authorized version is a key point in determining how to encourage our authors to publish their work according to the principles of the open access paradigm. The Virgen Macarena Hospital is one of Andalusia´s district hospitals and has been chosen as a sample for the present study. Objective: To analyse what the proportion of the Virgen Macarena Hospital’s research results published from 2011 to 2015 is open access and what is not. To know how many articles are already archived in the Repository using the publisher’s version or PDF and how many could be submitted using one of the author’s versions. Methods: Firstly, we searched the Hospital’s research output on Impactia, the application developed by the Andalusia eHealth Library to quantify the Andalusia Public Health System scientific output, the Web of Science and other databases. Secondly, we checked the publisher’s self-archiving policy of each one of the journals chosen for the Hospital’s authors on specialized databases and the publishers’ web sites. According to the obtained data, we compared the number of publisher’s versions with the author’s ones allowed to be submitted to the Repository. In addition, we consulted how many of the subscription-journals are considered to be hybrid journals. Results: More than 70% of the journals chosen by the researchers are subscription-based. None of these journals allows the publisher’s version to be archived. Over 73% of them offer an open access option to make articles free for everyone to read immediately after publication if the authors agree to pay a fee. However, fewer than 20% of the journals are open-access. Around 15% of these allow the re-use of publisher’s PDF, whereas 3% are only gratis open access and they do not permit selfarchiving.

In terms of articles, fewer than 15% of them can be submitted to the Repository as publisher’s version. All of these authorized PDF are already archived. However, 75% of the articles could be archived using one of the author’s versions. Not one of those articles is in the Repository. Conclusions: Only a small proportion of the articles published by the Virgen Macarena Hospital’s researchers is archived in the Repository. It seems highly recommended to take active measures to increase the number of deposited articles. These measures should be directed at promoting open access among authors and, especially, at encouraging self-archiving.