“An exciting and highly strategic way that Jülich is using Dimensions is in its Open Access Monitor, designed to help the German research community track the progress of Open Access adoption in the country.”

Philipp Pollack, Data & Metrics Specialist, Central Library, Forschungszentrum Jülich

The goal of Forschungszentrum Jülich’s research is to provide comprehensive solutions to the grand challenges society faces in the fields of energy and environment, information, and brain research. Its aim is to lay the foundation for the key technologies of tomorrow.

Jülich’s Central Library subscribed to Dimensions in 2018. In conjunction with GRID – Digital Science’s open data set of disambiguated organizational identifiers – Dimensions provides a flexible data set that serves a broad set of needs at the research institute.

Jülich uses the Dimensions Plus web app and data source to:

  • Integrate Altmetrics in its publications portal JuSER
  • Research for patents
  • Provide campus-wide IP range access for researchers

Monitoring Open Access growth

Another exciting and highly strategic way that Jülich is using Dimensions and GRID data is in its Open Access Monitor, which is designed to help the German research community track the progress of Open Access adoption in the country. Funded by the Federal Ministry of Education & Research, the tool aggregates, evaluates, and maps Germany’s existing OA data sets. The Open Access Monitor is in beta and can be accessed at https://open-access-monitor.de .

Dimensions supplies the monitor with authority files on publications, citations, publishers, and journals. While GRID provides the authority files for organizations so that outputs and authors can be correctly matched to parent institutions in Germany. All other sources used in the project (illustrated in Fig. 1) are, or will be mapped to Dimensions as the authority data set. These sources include article processing charge costs, subscription costs, counter usage statistics, and other OA metadata sources

Drawing on data piped from Dimensions, the monitor delivers the following views of German publishing activity:

  • Overall publication output for the country
  • Comparison of % closed access vs % Open Access publications
  • An interactive map showing the locations of all German research organizations and their publication and citation data
  • Journal publisher filter on publications data for each organization

Philipp discussed Jülich’s use cases for Dimensions during our recent Germany and Open Access webinar. The recording can be viewed at https://register.gotowebinar.com/recording/6621777291582266371.

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