A yearly check-in of some Scholarly Publishing topics at Brock University. It presents some analysis of publishing trends at Brock University over the 2024/2025 academic year. This inaugural report is being released in conjunction with Open Access Week 2025 to highlight Brock's participation in Open Access journal publishing.
Over the course of July 1, 2024 to June 30, 2025 a total of: 670 articles have been published by Brock Researchers.
We can divide all journal articles into two categories: Open Access or Closed. The Brock Library website explains the dynamics of these differences. The most important detail here however is that Open Access articles are available to readers without any payment! Sometimes a journal charges an author processing charge (APC) to make an article open access. This happens for both closed journals with some Open Access content and for totally Open Access journals.
Sometimes it is possible to publish an earlier version of a closed journal article in a place like the Brock University Digital Repository to have it become Open Access. We call this having a Green Open Access Pathway.
Does this sound confusing? Well it is. The following graph show the proportion of closed and open access articles published by Brock researchers.
We can now examine the the different colours of Open Access journals published. The pie graph below shows the breakdown of these categories versus the closed articles published. The library website has a description of what these colours mean.
As described above we can sometimes achieve Green Open Access by posting a version of an article or by paying a fee. The following graph shows how many of the still Closed papers have at least one paid for pathway to achieve some version of Open Access. What this means in practice is that the author(s) of the paper can pay a supplimenatary APC after publication to move the paper from Closed to Open Access. This can get expensive however. (APCs data is analyzed littler later on in this report).
In contrast, the following graph shows how many Closed papers have at least one free pathway to achieve some version of Open Access. This is great news, by doing a bit of work we can make a bunch of research available Open Access without paying any money.
This means that there is a free way to make 188 closed articles Open Access!
The library is developing a program to contact Brock affliated authors of these 188 articles to encourage them to submit an eligible version into the Brock Digital Repository to achieve Open Access. All researchers will need to is copy and paste the DOI of their paper and upload a PDF copy to a form.
If you published recently and fall in this category of Closed, expect an email soon with more details about this project.
As described some publishers enable Open Access through the payment of an additional Author Processing Charge (APC). This is on top of regular subscription costs that the library already pays to get access to the journal. All figures in CAD. Sometimes this fee is paid by a research grant, sometimes directly by the researcher. Since research teams span different organizations APC payments might also span different organizations, so it is fair to say these fees weren't all paid out by Brock researchers directly.
The Brock Library now has a collection of Transformative Agreements with some publishers that will offer some discounts to APC charges.
Some journal titles are popular with Brock Authors.
Some publishers also rank high in popularity.
Are these popular publishers producing open access content? We can combine a few things now to see just how open our top publishers are.
We have developed a new guide that will help you get the most of out of your publishing. The first step is to create an ORCID, and put Brock in your affiliation, both of these steps are outlined in the guide. Then when you publish be sure to share your ORCID with the journal and your content will automatically get included in this analysis.
Please don't hestitate to get in touch with us if you have questions about how this works, or if you need help setting up the pieces.
This data is built with a few assumptions involved and outlined below
Notebooks and data used to compile this report are freely available online. If you have an idea for what to add to this report please get in touch.
The data in this analysis was sourced from
