Recent evaluations conducted by Jisc have shown that the portfolios of eligible journals for the Springer Compact Agreements (SCA) differ between consortional partners. This evaluation is meant to provide a systematic framework to analyse those differences and also relate them to the full catalogue of hybrid Springer journals ("Open Choice"). Results are expected to be useful for further analyses on the effects and impacts of SCAs, like the Coverage Analysis conducted by our OpenAPC project or the impact estimations made by Jisc.
Springer provides individual lists of eligible journals for all participants on its web site, those can be downloaded in PDF Format ("Click here for a list of Open Choice eligible subscription-based journals covered by the Open Access agreement with Dutch universities and Academy institutes"). The according files have been obtained for all consortional partners (Netherlands, UK, Sweden, Austria, Finland, Poland, Hungary and the Max Planck Society (MPG)) and can be found here. Springer also provides a full catalogue of published journals as an Excel spreadsheet which can be found here ("2019 Springer Nature Journals including Open Access").
Update, 02/2020: Eligibility lists are now also provided as spreadsheets ("Hybrid journal list"), so the step of of PDF extraction will no longer be necessary in the future.
Our goal was to compile a full list of Springer hybrid journals, with a set of binary variables to indicate if a journal is present in a specific sub list. The following steps were carried out:
Since the SCA journal lists were only available in PDF format, a machine-readable variant had to be extracted first. This was done using the Tabula toolkit, the resulting CSV files can be found here.
The full Springer journal catalogue contains both fully OA and hybrid journals. Since only the latter are relevant to the SCA programme, the table was filtered, keeping only those entries with the value "Hybrid (Open Choice)" in the "open access" column. The spreadsheet was then exported to CSV (Catalogue.csv).
A python preprocessing script creates a combined, duplicate-free list of all journals appearing in any of the created CSV files. The column "product_id" serves as primary key to find matching journals, other identifiers like title or ISSNs turned out to be inconsistent between the lists. The script notifies of such cases, an attached log file shows the output.
The following table shows the number of journals contained in each list:
journal list | count |
---|---|
Catalogue | 1996 |
MPG | 1812 |
Netherlands | 1843 |
UK | 1820 |
Austria | 1838 |
Sweden | 1844 |
Finland | 1844 |
Hungary | 1844 |
Poland | 1844 |
Combined list | 2015 |
Out of these 2015 total entries, 1658 are common journals - they appear in all the SCA eligibility lists and also in the catalogue. This means that there's a set of 357 journals which are missing in at least one of the lists. The following interactive table shows all journals and the list they are (not) part of. The list may be filtered to certain combinations by entering TRUE oder FALSE into the search fields above the column headers. The entry in the product_id column links to the journal landing page on SpringerLink for easy reference.
Key insights from the filtering table are: