Scientific Value Weights more than Being Open or Toll Access: An analysis of the OA advantage in Nature and Science
Catégorie d'article: Research Paper
Publié en ligne: 26 sept. 2021
Pages: 62 - 75
Reçu: 30 janv. 2021
Accepté: 10 sept. 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/jdis-2021-0033
Mots clés
© 2021 Howell Y. Wang et al., published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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
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
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.