Associations Between Article Metadata and Open Access in Japanese Institutional Repositories: Implications for Prioritizing Full-Text Requests

In Japan, the national open access (OA) policy requires journal articles resulting from funded research to be made openly available, in principle, through an institutional repository (IR). Institutions can promote OA through an IR by issuing “full-text requests” that ask affiliated researchers to provide full-text files for deposit. However, tasks before and after sending requests make this approach difficult for many institutions with limited resources. One resource-saving approach is to prioritize journal articles for which requests are more likely to succeed. Journal article metadata can guide resource allocation, and the corresponding author field has been used as a decision criterion to limit full-text requests to journal articles in which an affiliated researcher is the corresponding author. This study examined whether journal article metadata could help prioritize full-text requests. Because requests and outcomes were not directly observed, we examined associations between five metadata fields and IR-based OA status separately at three institutions with many IR-based OA journal articles. Journal articles with an OA version of record (VoR) were more likely to be OA in the IRs at two institutions but less likely at the third. These findings may inform institution-specific prioritization, but effectiveness requires evaluation using request records.