A 2-year retrospective into the open information landscape: Learnings from the TOBI project

Kubacka, Teresa; Willemin, Simon; Dederke, Julian

doi:10.5281/zenodo.15807578

A 2-year retrospective into the open information landscape: Learnings from the TOBI project

Kubacka, Teresa; Willemin, Simon; Dederke, Julian

Publisher: Zenodo
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15807578
Repository: zenodo.org
Language: en

Abstract

The poster presents an overview of the diverse outcomes of the project Towards Open Bibliometric Indicators (TOBI), ran by the ETH Library (ETH Zurich). The project was launched in March 2023 with the goal of assessing the usability of open scholarly metadata for bibliometric analyses in Switzerland. The poster discusses main project findings grouped into three categories: (1) bibliometric analyses of viability and data quality of selected open scholarly metadata databases, with a special focus on Swiss higher education institutions (HEIs); (2) development of new methods to systematically evaluate the data quality; (3) actions undertaken to promote usage of open bibliometric data in Switzerland. Additionally, the poster presents a brief overview of major developments in the open research information landscape, such as the launch of the Barcelona Declaration, as well as shifts in national strategies including Switzerland’s Open Science initiatives. The project fits into the trend of increasing reliability and strategic value of open data in research evaluation, while highlighting how community-driven improvements and institutional engagement can enhance quality of scholarly metadata, leading to more responsible research assessment.

Full text

Notes and references Tools to describe and clean datasets Overview and analysis of open scholarly metadata databases A 2-year retrospective into the open information landscape: Learnings from the TOBI project Teresa Kubacka, Simon Willemin, Julian Dederke (ETH Library, ETH Zurich, Switzerland) •Initial assessment showed a wide variety of database sizes in the open research information landscape; global databases are expected to contain more than 10 million bibliographic entities1 Actions to improve the quality of open scholarly metadata in Switzerland •Curative actions. Cleaning and curation of institutional metadata in ROR5and OpenOrgs6 •TOBI Portfolio. Collection of Jupyter Notebooks to support the use of open bibliometric data sources in higher education institutions7 •Recommendations paper. Paper with 14 recommendations to enhance the visibility of research in the open research information landscape8 •Definitions and diagrams to identify and describe interdependence between columns in a given dataset allow for a more systematic approach to data cleaning4 05/2013 DORA Declaration 2021 UNESCO Recommendation Open Science 2021 Start Swiss Program OS I (2021-4) 07/2022 CoARA Agreement 03/2023 Start of TOBI project 01/2024 Open Edition Leiden Ranking 04/2024 Barcelona Declaration 2025 Start Swiss Program OS II (2025-8) 06/2025 End of TOBI project 1 Kubacka, T., & Willemin, S. (2023). Evaluating the quality and reliability of open bibliometric data for country-wide research assessment purposes in Switzerland –insights from project TOBI [Conference presentation]. WOOC2023, Bologna, Italy, slide 11, doi:10.5281/zenodo.10041143 2 Dederke, J., Koch, M., & Willemin, S. (2024). The Representation of Swiss Higher Education Institutions in Five Bibliometric Databases. Qualität in der Wissenschaft, 2024(4), 117-124, doi:10.3929/ethz-b-000726102. Underlying data: Koch, M., Dederke, J., & Willemin, S. (2024). Publication counts for Swiss Higher Education Institutions in five bibliometric databases (2012-2022) [Dataset], doi:10.3929/ethz-b-000694041 3 See also: Willemin, S. (2024). What do open global scholarly metadata databases contain? [Conference presentation]. OR2024, Gothenburg, Sweden, slides 21-25, doi:10.5281/zenodo.12514344 4 (in press) Willemin, S. (2025). Two definitions to characterize the relations between columns in a given scholarly metadata data set. Quantitative Science Studies, doi:10.1162/qss_a_00362 5 See for instance: https://github.com/ror-community/ror-updates/issues/12828 6 OpenOrgs, https://openorgs.openaire.eu 7 Giryes, E., Willemin, S., Dederke, J., & Kubacka, T. (2025). TOBI portfolio, https://github.com/eth-library/tobi-portfolio 8 Willemin, S. (Ed.) (2025). Recommendations for Swiss Higher Education Institutions to enhance the visibility of their research output, ETH Library, ETH Zurich, doi:10.3929/ethz-b-000735240 TOBI (Towards Open Bibliometric Indicators) is a project that aims to evaluate the quality of open bibliometric data sources regarding research affiliated with Swiss Higher Education Institutions (https://eth-library.github.io/tobi). 41%44% 2% 12% Swiss population by language 62%23% 8% Language regions in Switzerland 7% of all articles are not in English French German Other Italian Fig.1: Overview of databases with more than 10 million records. Fig.2: Differing article counts across open and established databases for selected Swiss HEIs (avg per year, 2018-2022). Fig.3: Detected languages of all articles authored in Switzerland in 2017-2023 (OpenAlex). •In OpenAlex, there are less articles authored in Switzerland attributed to German than to French, although more than 60% of the population is Swiss Germanand German-speaking and less than 25% is French-speaking3 •Patterns of publication numbers differ across open (and closed) bibliometric databases; smaller size institutions are at a disadvantage when it comes to monitoring their scientific output2