Mendeley: Measuring OA rates

Having talked about Mendeley's OA deposit rates in my last blog post, I thought it worthwhile to check how representative my chosen discipline (Computer Science) was. Rather than download the entire community for each other discipline, I have performed a quick and dirty sample of some of the available literature in each discipline using the search function. Each Mendeley search result offers the option of saving the PDF (if available) to your library, so it is a simple matter to wget some search results and grep for PDFs.

The table below shows the results of this procedure for 11 disciplines (two illustrative keywords each). The "available PDFs" column records the number of PDFs offered on the first page of the search results (each page contains 200 results); the total number of results shows the relative coverage of the topic in Mendeley.

Computer Science appears to be in the 5-10% range of OA (18 or 11 PDFs out of a page of 200 results) which does seem to be just about average. Social Science, Medicine, Health Science, Economics and the Humanities appear to have fewer PDFs and Maths and Physics appear to have rather more.

Search term	Discipline	Available PDFs	Total Results
chromatography	Chem	10	14260
crystallography	Chem	27	4921
JAVA	CS	18	848
software	CS	11	15185
geology	Earth	36	4180
hydrodynamic	Earth	40	2853
econometrics	Economics	13	565
microeconomics	Economics	5	88
biodiversity	Env	14	4668
climate	Env	14	13003
nursing	Health	6	10723
palliative	Health	6	1978
archaeology	Hum	6	1730
Foucault	Hum	11	248
algebra	Math	101	4424
cohomology	Math	171	525
cancer	Med	11	52315
pharmacology	Med	4	62285
quasar	Phys	127	556
telescope	Phys	101	2347
cognition	Psy	11	18805
schizophrenia	Psy	17	4055
criminology	SocSci	2	154
sociology	SocSci	2	2005