For picturing the perception about the business model debate from a non academic point of view we started with a focused research on Google, then switched to analysing the most influential general newspapers in the world. The purpose is to see how relevant and how deep the dispute is by pointing out the percentage of economic studies above all the OA findings and indexing the used terms in those kinds of media.
For the first part, we logged out of Google and went incognito. We used two different queries: "open access debate" and "open access business model"; we tried to consider as many results as possible, only giving up when results were no longer related to OA, this happening beyond the tenth page in both cases.
Each result was opened and analysed with a manual indexing of keywords like pay, fee, charge, publication. The online tool Raw let us visualise how many of these words were found overall and per page. Websites containing each of the pages were then divided into two categories: general or OA specific. At last, contents were classified as neutral or critic.
In order to see how relevant and influential knowledge given to a non academic audience is, we picked six newspapers from the top 10 most read newspapers in the world list published by comScore; actually, four of them were news agencies or editors, but we only picked the single newspapers of the list: People's Daily, The Daily Mail, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Xinhua News Agency.
For each of these, we used their own search function (except for Xinhua where we used LexisNexis because of Xinhua's hard to use research button) and looked for the query "open access" - including the inverted commas. We then looked for the top 100 results per newspaper sorted by relevance, excluding all those previous to October 22nd, 2013 (the date of the Berlin Declaration) to make sure "Open Access" is used in the way we mean now. The People's Daily was then left out as no "open access" result was linked to the publishing method.
On the first diagram you can see the distribution of economic topics in different Google results. On the horizontal axis you have the keywords, while on the vertical axis you have different sources.
For every URL you can see how much each of the keywords appears through the balloons size, while the colour indicates if the article was neutral (blue) or critic (red) about the business model. The opacity - 50% or 100% - indicates whether the website which published the article was a general source (i.e. Wikipedia, general newspaper) or an Open Access themed one (i.e. specific blogs, Open Access journals).
The second chart is a timeline counting how many articles are written per year from each of the analysed newspapers. The X axis obviously represents time, while on the Y axis there are our 5 sources. Each rectangle represents an article and its colour tells if said article was an economic in-depth study (more than 1.5 specific words out of 100), a general study also including economy details (0.5 to 1.5 per 100 words) or a non-economic article (0.5 per 100 words or less). It also gives an insight over the most active years in OA discussions and most active newspapers on the topic.
It is interesting to notice how the first query, a general debate inquiry, shows results from non specific sources as expected, but which go kind of deep into the issue and sometimes choose a position in the dispute. The second query generates a different picture, with mostly specific websites discussing and often choosing not to express an open opinion about it. This is probably a deliberate choice in order to hold an unbiased attitude.
In the second graphics we can see a first, clear insight: in 2012 there was an explosion in OA talks which settled for the two years after before cooling off in 2015. The most active newspaper clearly was The Guardian, followed by The Washington Post and The New York Times which have a similar number of results. On a first sight we see Xinhua News doesn't really talk about Open Access, but it is far less surprising than the Daily Mail and People's Daily talking even less given that the first is Chinese, and China isn't as much concerned about openness as western Europe countries and the USA.
