Coronavirus mapping in scientific publications: When science advances rapidly and collectively, is access to this knowledge open to society?

Authors : Simone Belli, Rogério Mugnaini, Joan Baltà, Ernest Abadal

The COVID-19 pandemic is creating a global health emergency. Mapping this health emergency in scientific publications demands multiple approaches to obtain a picture as complete as possible. To progress in the knowledge of this pandemic and to control its effects, international collaborations between researchers are essentials, as well as having open and immediate access to scientific publications, what we called “coopetition”.

Our main objectives are to identify the most productive countries in coronavirus publications, to analyse the international scientific collaboration on this topic, and to study the proportion and typology of open accessibility to these publications.

We have analyzed 18,875 articles indexed in Web of Science. We performed the descriptive statistical analysis in order to explore the performance of the more prolific countries and organizations, as well as paying attention to the last 2 years. Registers have been analyzed separately via the VOSviewer software, drawing a network of links among countries and organizations to identify the starred countries and organizations, and the strongest links of the net.

We have explored the capacity of researchers to generate scientific knowledge about a health crisis emergency, and their global capacity to collaborate among them in a global emergency. We consider that science is moving rapidly to find solutions to international health problems but access to this knowledge by society is not so quick due to several limitations (open access policies, corporate interests, etc.).

We have observed that papers from China in the last 3 months (from January 2020 to March 2020) have a strong impact compared with papers published in years before. The United States and China are the major producers of documents of our sample, followed by all European countries, especially the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and France.

At the same time, the leading role of Saudi Arabia, Canada or South Korea should be noted, with a significant number of documents submitted but very different dynamics of international collaboration.

The proportion of international collaboration is growing in all countries in 2019–2020, which contrasts with the situation of the last two decades. The organizations providing the most documents to the sample are mostly Chinese.

The percentage of open access articles on coronavirus for the period 2001–2020 is 59.2% but if we focus in 2020 the figures increase up to 91.4%, due to the commitment of commercial publishers with the emergency.

URL : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03590-7

Authorship Distribution and Collaboration in LIS Open Access Journals: A Scopus based analysis during 2001 to 2015

Authors : Barik Nilaranjan, Jena Puspanjali

The present study is a bibliometric analysis of some selected open access Library and Information Science (LIS) journals indexed in Scopus database during the period 2001 to 2015. The study has covered 10 LIS open access journals with 5208 publications to establish an idea about the pattern of authorship, research collaboration, collaboration index, degree of collaboration, collaboration coefficient, author’s productivity, ranking of prolific authors etc. of said journals.

Lotkas’s inverse square law has been applied to know the scientific productivity of authors. Results show that, the covered LIS open access journals are dominant with single authorship pattern.

The value of Collaborative Index (0.73), Degree of Collaboration (0.72), and Collaboration Coefficient (0.29) do not show the trend of collaboration. Lotka’s law of author’s productivity is fitting to the present data set.

The country wise distribution of authorship based on the country of origin of the corresponding author shows that 83 countries across the Globe are active in publication of their research in LIS open access journals. United States of America (USA) is the leader country producing of 2822 (54.19%) authors alone.

URL : https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/2033/

A bibliometric study of directory of open access journal: Special reference to philosophy

Authors : Sanjay Karak, Shiuli Kower

The aims of the present study are to be decided the number of free e-journal in the field of Philosophy available on DOAJ. For this study the author has adopted bibliometric method and analyzed by country-wise distribution, language-wise distribution and review-wise distribution, 126 open access journals published from 33 different countries in 26 different languages all over the world and Brazil is the leading publishing country in this way. Moreover, English has been found as the most popular language of OA journals.

URL : A bibliometric study of directory of open access journal: Special reference to philosophy

Alternative location : http://ijidt.com/index.php/ijidt/article/view/753

La production scientifique des chercheurs de la faculté de médecine et de pharmacie de Casablanca : mesures, cartographie et enjeux du libre accès

Auteur/Author : Hanae Lrhoul

Notre travail de thèse vise à établir un diagnostic des potentialités scientifiques marocaines et à concevoir de nouveaux dispositifs pour la mesure, la cartographie et l’open access à la science locale.Pour bâtir des systèmes nationaux de recherche et garantir le développement socioéconomique du Maroc, les décideurs des universités ont besoin d’indicateurs d’analyse et d’évaluation de leur patrimoine scientifique.

Les principales sources utilisées pour effectuer cette analyse sont les bases de données internationales « Scopus » et « Web of Science », en dépit de leurs biais d’indexation et de couverture de la science des pays du Sud.

Cela induit un questionnement quant au manque hypothétique de la visibilité de la science marocaine. Ce manque de visibilité serait-il dû à la faible présence des revues nationales dans les bases de données internationales ? Ou relèverait-il de la faible qualité des publications marocaines ?

La science marocaine est-elle une science à visée locale, abordant des thèmes qui ne figurent pas dans l’agenda de la science universelle ? Les apports de l’open access quant à l’augmentation de la visibilité et de l’impact de la recherche sont-ils méconnus des universitaires marocains ?

La réponse à ces questions est accomplie à travers l’étude de cas de la Faculté de Médecine et de Pharmacie de Casablanca (FMPC). Elle s’articule autour de trois objectifs spécifiques : 1/ Recenser la production scientifique ; 2/ cartographier la production scientifique et explorer l’existence d’une relation entre l’indexation des publications dans les bases de données internationales et leur visibilité 3/ évaluer les comportements et les usages de l’open access par les chercheurs.

Les principaux résultats de l’analyse et de la cartographie de la production scientifique de la FMPC, attestent que celle-ci jouit d’une grande visibilité à l’échelle internationale. La juxtaposition des publications nationales et internationales permet de confirmer que 70% des publications scientifiques de la FMPC sont intégrées dans les bases de données internationales et que 74.21 % de l’ensemble des articles sont publiés en anglais.

Par ailleurs, on ne pourrait exclure 30% des publications nationales de l’évaluation bibliométrique au risque de biaiser les politiques scientifiques du pays.D’autres résultats de la thèse sont constitués par la mise en place du dépôt institutionnel de l’Université et du portail de revues médicales, créés afin d’assurer une large diffusion de la production des chercheurs de la FMPC et d’augmenter sa visibilité et son impact.

Néanmoins, les résultats de l’enquête menée auprès des chercheurs ont montré que la principale barrière à l’adoption de l’open access est la méconnaissance des avantages des dispositifs de libre accès à l’IST quant à l’augmentation de leur impact et de leur visibilité.

Les résultats de la cartographie de la FMPC et de l’étude des comportements des chercheurs à l’égard de l’open access, nous ont permis de proposer des fondements pour l’édification d’indicateurs adaptés au contexte marocain.

URL : https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01815122

The World’s Approach toward Publishing in Springer and Elsevier’s APC-Funded Open Access Journals

Authors : Hajar Sotudeh, Zahra Ghasempour

Purpose

The present study explored tendencies of the world’s countries—at individual and scientific development levels—toward publishing in APC-funded open access journals.

Design/Methodology/Approach

Using a bibliometric method, it studied OA and NOA articles issued in Springer and Elsevier’s APC journals‎ during 2007–2011. The data were gathered using a wide number of sources including Sherpa/Romeo, Springer Author-mapper, Science Direct, Google, and journals’ websites.

Findings

The Netherlands, Norway, and Poland ranked highest in terms of their OA shares. This can be attributed to the financial resources allocated to publication in general, and publishing in OA journals in particular, by the countries.

All developed countries and a large number of scientifically lagging and developing nations were found to publish OA articles in the APC journals. The OA papers have been exponentially growing across all the countries’ scientific groups annually.

Although the advanced nations published the lion’s share of the OA-APC papers and exhibited the highest growth, the underdeveloped groups have been displaying high OA growth rates.

Practical Implications

Given the reliance of the APC model on authors’ affluence and motivation, its affordability and sustainability have been challenged.

This communication helps understand how countries at different scientific development and thus wealth levels contribute to the model.

Originality/Value

This is the first study conducted at macro level clarifying countries’ contribution to the APC model—at individual and scientific-development levels—as the ultimate result of the interaction between authors’ willingness, the model affordability, and publishers and funding agencies’ support.

URL : The World’s Approach toward Publishing in Springer and Elsevier’s APC-Funded Open Access Journals

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.79.2.257

Evidence of Open Access of scientific publications in Google Scholar: a large-scale analysis

Authors : Alberto Martín-Martín, Rodrigo Costas, Thed van Leeuwen, Emilio López-Cózar

This article uses Google Scholar (GS) as a source of data to analyse Open Access (OA) levels across all countries and fields of research. All articles and reviews with a DOI and published in 2009 or 2014 and covered by the three main citation indexes in the Web of Science (2,269,022 documents) were selected for study.

The links to freely available versions of these documents displayed in GS were collected. To differentiate between more reliable (sustainable and legal) forms of access and less reliable ones, the data extracted from GS was combined with information available in DOAJ, CrossRef, OpenDOAR, and ROAR.

This allowed us to distinguish the percentage of documents in our sample that are made OA by the publisher (23.1%, including Gold, Hybrid, Delayed, and Bronze OA) from those available as Green OA (17.6%), and those available from other sources (40.6%, mainly due to ResearchGate).

The data shows an overall free availability of 54.6%, with important differences at the country and subject category levels. The data extracted from GS yielded very similar results to those found by other studies that analysed similar samples of documents, but employed different methods to find evidence of OA, thus suggesting a relative consistency among methods.

URL : Evidence of Open Access of scientific publications in Google Scholar: a large-scale analysis

Alternative location : https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/k54uv/

Open access availability of scientific publications

Author : Science-Metrix Inc.

This report details population-level measurements of the open access (OA) availability of publications indexed in two bibliometric databases—the Web of Science (WoS) by Clarivate Analytics and Scopus by Elsevier. This was achieved by matching the bibliometric database populations to the 1science database to determine the availability of the papers in OA form.

A comparative analysis of the recall and precision levels of the 1science database was performed using Scopus and the WoS. This helped to characterize the 1science database. Two policy-relevant indicators were selected for in-depth analyses: country affiliation of authors on publications, and scientific disciplines. These indicators were selected because they are very frequently used in bibliometric studies, including those performed by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and they appear in the NSF’s Science and Engineering Indicators.

URL : http://www.science-metrix.com/sites/default/files/science-metrix/publications/science-metrix_open_access_availability_scientific_publications_report.pdf