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Lucía Céspedes

Publications and source records attributed to Lucía Céspedes.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

Funders open access mandates: uneven uptake and challenging models

Over the last two decades, research funders have adopted Open Access (OA) mandates, with various forms and success. While some funders emphasize gold OA through article processing charges, others favour green OA and repositories, leading to a fragmented policy landscape. Compliance with these mandates depends on several factors, including disciplinary field, monitoring, and availability of repository infrastructure. Based on 5 million papers supported by 36 funders from 20 countries, 11 million papers funded by other organisations, and 10 million papers without any funding reported, this study explores how different policies influence the adoption of OA. Findings indicate a sustained growth in OA overall, especially hybrid and gold OA, and that funded papers are more likely to be OA than unfunded papers. Those results suggest that policies such as Plan S, as well as read-and-publish agreements, have had a strong influence on OA adoption, especially among European funders. However, the global low uptake of Diamond OA and limited indexing of OA outputs in Latin American countries highlight ongoing disparities, influenced by funding constraints, journal visibility, and regional infrastructure challenges.

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Sorting the Babble in Babel: Assessing the Performance of Language Identification Algorithms on the OpenAlex Database

This project aims to optimize the linguistic indexing of the OpenAlex database by comparing the performance of various Python-based language identification procedures on different metadata corpora extracted from a manually-annotated article sample \footnote{OpenAlex used the results presented in this article to inform the language metadata overhaul carried out as part of its recent Walden system launch. The precision and recall performance of each algorithm, corpus, and language is first analyzed, followed by an assessment of processing speeds recorded for each algorithm and corpus type. These different performance measures are then simulated at the database level using probabilistic confusion matrices for each algorithm, corpus, and language, as well as a probabilistic modeling of relative article language frequencies for the whole OpenAlex database. Results show that procedure performance strongly depends on the importance given to each of the measures implemented: for contexts where precision is preferred, using the LangID algorithm on the greedy corpus gives the best results; however, for all cases where recall is considered at least slightly more important than precision or as soon as processing times are given any kind of consideration, the procedure that consists in the application of the FastText algorithm on the Titles corpus outperforms all other alternatives. Given the lack of truly multilingual large-scale bibliographic databases, it is hoped that these results help confirm and foster the unparalleled potential of the OpenAlex database for cross-linguistic and comprehensive measurement and evaluation.

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A smack of all neighbouring languages: How multilingual is scholarly communication?

Language is a major source of systemic inequities in science, particularly among scholars whose first language is not English. Studies have examined scientists' linguistic practices in specific contexts; few, however, have provided a global analysis of multilingualism in science. Using two major bibliometric databases (OpenAlex and Dimensions), we provide a large-scale analysis of linguistic diversity in science, considering both the language of publications (N=87,577,942) and of cited references (N=1,480,570,087). For the 1990-2023 period, we find that only Indonesian, Portuguese and Spanish have expanded at a faster pace than English. Country-level analyses show that this trend is due to the growing strength of the Latin American and Indonesian academic circuits. Our results also confirm the own-language preference phenomenon (particularly for languages other than English), the strong connection between multilingualism and bibliodiversity, and that social sciences and humanities are the least English-dominated fields. Our findings suggest that policies recognizing the value of both national-language and English-language publications have had a concrete impact on the distribution of languages in the global field of scholarly communication.

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Diamond open access and open infrastructures have shaped the Canadian scholarly journal landscape since the start of the digital era

Scholarly publishing involves multiple stakeholders having various types of interest. In Canada, the implication of universities, the presence of societies and the availability of governmental support for periodicals seem to have contributed to a rather diverse ecosystem of journals. This study presents in detail the current state of these journals, in addition to past trends and transformations during the 20th century and, in particular, the digital era. To this effect, we created a new dataset, including a total of 1256 journals, 944 of which appeared to be active today, specifically focusing on the supporting organizations behind the journals, the types of (open) access, disciplines, geographic origins, languages of publication and hosting platforms and tools. The main overarching traits across Canadian scholarly journals are an important presence of Diamond open access, which has been adopted by 62% of the journals, a predominance of the Social Sciences and Humanities disciplines and a scarce presence of the major commercial publishers. The digital era allowed for the development of open infrastructures, which contributed to the creation of a new generation of journals that massively adopted Diamond open access, often supported by university libraries. However, journal cessation also increased, especially among the recently founded journals. These results provide valuable insights for the design of tailored practices and policies that cater to the needs of different types of periodicals and that take into account the evolving practices across the Canadian scholarly journal landscape.

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Evaluating the Linguistic Coverage of OpenAlex: An Assessment of Metadata Accuracy and Completeness

Clarivate's Web of Science (WoS) and Elsevier's Scopus have been for decades the main sources of bibliometric information. Although highly curated, these closed, proprietary databases are largely biased towards English-language publications, underestimating the use of other languages in research dissemination. Launched in 2022, OpenAlex promised comprehensive, inclusive, and open-source research information. While already in use by scholars and research institutions, the quality of its metadata is currently being assessed. This paper contributes to this literature by assessing the completeness and accuracy of OpenAlex's metadata related to language, through a comparison with WoS, as well as an in-depth manual validation of a sample of 6,836 articles. Results show that OpenAlex exhibits a far more balanced linguistic coverage than WoS. However, language metadata is not always accurate, which leads OpenAlex to overestimate the place of English while underestimating that of other languages. If used critically, OpenAlex can provide comprehensive and representative analyses of languages used for scholarly publishing. However, more work is needed at infrastructural level to ensure the quality of metadata on language.

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