Data for "Breaking the Paywall: The role of Open Journal System as key Open Science infrastructure"

Context

This research was conducted within the SEEKCommons Project, a research initiative dedicated to supporting Open Science and Open Access in disciplinary research. The project has a special interest in understanding the role that critical infrastructure has in supporting open initiatives. The Open Journal System (OJS) serves as a long-standing fundamental piece for Open Access throughout the globe. Hence, it provides valuable information about experiences developing, deploying, and maintaining open technologies. 

Methods

We used mixed methods for our research, triangulating repository data, installation data, interviews, and documentary analysis. We collected repository data using a report generator (Kopp [2018] 2024) that uses repository metadata to present general statistics about a Git project. The resulting information was manually curated, disambiguated, and annotated to have a homogeneous set of developers with information about their institutional affiliation and country. 

Names are normalized based on the information in qualitative interviews and by browsing the full-extent commits in the GitHub repository. Other sources for this were the institutional materials (available in current and archived versions of the PKP website), meeting minutes, the user forum, and further project documentation available online. GitHub handles are homologated to their most comprehensive version. For institutional and country affiliation, we resorted to GitHub profiles, PKP documentation and forums, institutional domains available in emails, and researchers' ORCID IDs. 

Available files

Information about the codebase (number of files, lines of code, and timestamp) organized by month, quarter, and semester. See file: OJS_GitStats_04-24.csv

Information about the historical evolution of the codebase (number of files, lines of code, and timestamp), including a description of the top committers for each month. Commiters are described by including their institutional affiliation and country of origin. See file: OJS_DevStats_Institution-Country_1.tsv

Information about the historical evolution of the codebase focusing on top committers, along with their institution and country. This file is formatted to map the co-occurrence of developers and attributes by month between 2004-2024.See file: OJS_DevStats_Institution-Country_2.tsv

Selected fields to describe working and regularly maintained plugins for OJS as of October 2024. Includes name of the plugin, homepage, description, maintainer, and institutional affiliation. See file: OJS_Plugins_2024_Processed.tsv

Details of the aggregated information included in Table 5 of the article.See file: OJS_Plugins_2024_Table5.tsv

Snapshot to XML information of the plugin gallery of OJS (October 21) retrieved from PKP website (Smecher 2024)See file: OJS_Plugins_2024.csv