Scientific Value Weights more than Being Open or Toll Access: An analysis of the OA advantage in Nature and Science

doi:10.2478/jdis-2021-0033

Abstract

Abstract:

Purpose: We attempt to find out whether OA or TA really affects the dissemination of scientific discoveries.
Design/methodology/approach: We design the indicators, hot-degree, and R-index to indicate a topic OA or TA advantages. First, according to the OA classification of the Web of Science (WoS), we collect data from the WoS by downloading OA and TA articles, letters, and reviews published in Nature and Science during 2010-2019. These papers are divided into three broad disciplines, namely biomedicine, physics, and others. Then, taking a discipline in a journal and using the classical Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to cluster 100 topics of OA and TA papers respectively, we apply the Pearson correlation coefficient to match the topics of OA and TA, and calculate the hot-degree and R-index of every OA-TA topic pair. Finally, characteristics of the discipline can be presented. In qualitative comparison, we choose some high-quality papers which belong to Nature remarkable papers or Science breakthroughs, and analyze the relations between OA/TA and citation numbers.
Findings: The result shows that OA hot-degree in biomedicine is significantly greater than that of TA, but significantly less than that of TA in physics. Based on the R-index, it is found that OA advantages exist in biomedicine and TA advantages do in physics. Therefore, the dissemination of average scientific discoveries in all fields is not necessarily affected by OA or TA. However, OA promotes the spread of important scientific discoveries in high-quality papers.
Research limitations: We lost some citations by ignoring other open sources such as arXiv and bioArxiv. Another limitation came from that Nature employs some strong measures for access-promoting subscription-based articles, on which the boundary between OA and TA became fuzzy.
Practical implications: It is useful to select hot topics in a set of publications by the hot-degree index. The finding comprehensively reflects the differences of OA and TA in different disciplines, which is a useful reference when researchers choose the publishing way as OA or TA.
Originality/value: We propose a new method, including two indicators, to explore and measure OA or TA advantages.

Key words: Open access, Toll access, Scientific discovery, Academic dissemination, Data analysis

Y. Wang, Howell, Shelia X. Wei, Cong Cao, Xianwen Wang, and Fred Y. Ye. "Scientific Value Weights more than Being Open or Toll Access: An analysis of the OA advantage in Nature and Science." Journal of Data and Information Science, vol.6, no.4, 2021, pp.62-75. DOI: 10.2478/jdis-2021-0033

Figures/Tables 7

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Statistical data		Nature		Science
Statistical data		OA	TA	OA	TA
Biomedical	Papers	4214	2227	2943	1572
Biomedical	Median Citations	138	101	104	114
Physical	Papers	444	1,690	1,006	1,487
Physical	Median Citations	81	85	78	119
Other	Papers	2,419	510	674	2,770
Other	Median Citations	1	7.5	76	1
Total	Papers	7,077	4,427	4,623	5,829
Total	Median Citations	64	87	95	58

Indicators		Nature			Science
Indicators		OA	TA	p-value	OA	TA	p-value
Biomedical	hot-degree	183.5	119	3.7e-38	103	15.5	6.6e-61
Biomedical	R-index		1.57			7.3
Physical	hot-degree	5	26	1.6e-23	11	19	6.9e-11
Physical	R-index		0.20			0.63
Other	hot-degree	2	2	0.0006	5	6	0.049
Other	R-index		0.39			0.83
Total	hot-degree	188	123.5	2.5e-26	160	128	2e-20
Total	R-index		1.55			1.27