Ranking the Openness of Criminology Units: An Attempt to Incentivize the Use of Librarians, Institutional Repositories, and Unit-Dedicated Collections to Increase Scholarly Impact and Justice

In this article, I describe and explain a way for criminologists—as individuals, as groups, and, especially, as university units (e.g., colleges, departments, schools)—to increase the quantity and quality of open criminology. They should ask university librarians to make their outputs open access (OA) on their “unit repositories” (URs), which are unit-dedicated “collections” on universities’ institutional repositories (IR). I try to advance this practice by devising and employing a metric, the “URscore,” to document, analyze, and rank criminology units’ contributions to open criminology, as prescribed. To illustrate the metric’s use, I did a study of 45 PhD-granting criminology units in the United States. I found almost all of them have access to an IR; less than two thirds have a UR; less than one third have used it this decade; their URs have a total of 190 open outputs from the 2020s, with 78% emanating from the top three “most open” PhD-granting criminology units in the United States: University of California, Irvine (with 72 open outputs), John Jay College of Criminal Justice (with 47 such outputs), and University of Nebraska, Omaha (with 30 such outputs). I end with a discussion of critical issues, instructions, and futures, including what I learned from publishing this article’s preprint.