After more than two decades of debates, initiatives and funding, Open Access can be seen as being established in the scientific publication landscape: Science policies increasingly demand and mandate through their funding agencies for Open Access (e.g. Horizon2020, Plan S); publishers have adjusted their business models, and scientists have started to publish in Open Access and create open journals. Despite this success story of Open Access, discussions have started recently about the foundational goal of Open Access concerning the transformation of the whole publication landscape toward Open Access. Critics argue that a ‘‘one-size-fits-all’’ concept limits the diversity of scholarly publication (bibliodiversity) and that still a few big publishers dominate the landscape (Larivière et al. 2015).

In this article, the monitoring of Open Access publications is focused by describing the specific situation of educational sciences and analysing relevant requirements. Studies in educational science describe the need to consider in Open Access the specific publication culture and practices of the research communities (Bambey 2016) and hint at the special role of books in the scholarly community (Rummler, Schindler 2018). Additionally, the publication landscape is discussed in relation to the broader reputation system demanding a sustainable publication system (Shephard et al. 2019).

Part of the establishment process of Open Access is the increased realisation of studies (e.g. Piwowar et al. 2018; Wohlgemuth et al. 2017) analysing the situation of Open Access and providing insights for OA compliance (Picarra, Swan 2015; Melero 2018), which is being professionalized in ongoing OA monitoring systems (Stern 2018). While these studies discuss in detail the different elements of Open Access (e.g. gold, green, hybrid, bronze, platinum, and embargo), this article argues for the need to consider the complete coverage of the publication output of a research community to address a community-specific OA monitoring. Therefore, requirements from bibliographic databases (Dees, Rittberger 2009) are described in detail and enriched with Open Access criteria. To validate the requirements, three cases of OA monitoring systems are analysed: 1) the Open Science Monitor of the European Commission, 2) the Open-Access-Monitor.de, and 3) the Danish Open Access Indicator.

Based on literature research and analysis of bibliometric instruments, requirements for an Open Access monitoring are identified and systematized. The main aspects of requirements concern the 1) content, 2) structure, and 3) processes of ongoing quality assurance (Dees, Rittberger 2009). The first aspect of content relies on classical quality indicators of a bibliographic database like scope, coverage, currency, timeliness, and consistency (Rittberger, Rittberger 1997). The analysed monitoring examples base mainly on existing bibliographic databases like Scopus and WebofScience or aggregate different reference databases. Existing metadata of these databases create the main structure (2), which are extended through OA services (e.g. unpaywall, OpenAIre, SHERPA) often based on Unified Identifier (e.g. DOI, ISSN). All services and databases base on 3) different quality assurance processes concerning transparency and consistency.

The requirements for an Open Access monitoring in educational sciences are exemplified by the analysis of three OA monitoring cases. Thereby, it is demonstrated that an Open Access monitoring rests on requirements similar to data bases for bibliographic analysis. Classical quality indicators like scope and coverage of a bibliographic database are fundamental to the monitoring. All three monitoring examples in this respect miss main parts of the publication output of educational sciences in the form of books resp. monographies and collected works. This means that in all three cases, more than 60% of the publication output in educational science are out of scope (Singleton et al. 2015). Additionally to these classical requirements, each monitoring needs to validate its OA property in relation to the interested insight. Is the proportional distribution of the “free access” (minimum of bronze) enough or are different ways of OA relevant (like gold, green, hybrid)? Thereby, it needs to be considered that further properties also need further quality assurances processes at the ongoing production processes, which can become very complex and time-consuming. The bottle neck of the OA properties are the available Uniform Resource Identifier (mainly DOI) and the enrichment with OA properties through OA aggregators and OA directories (e.g. unpaywall, OpenAire, DOAJ, DOAB, SHERPA). Furthermore, Open Access – as part of Open Science – emphasises the aspect of transparency. Therefore classical literature databases offer policies wherein the scope of the included publications (like lists of journals) and the criteria for collecting are described. Open Access extends this by a crucial aspect: the openness of the full range of collected metadata themselves; ideally documented in the FAIR way, which is the recommendation for research data of the European Commission, which should be as well the standard for Open Science Monitoring.

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