We saw before how much the OA debate dwells inside the academic world: that's why we chose to actually analyse academic publications talking about Open Access. The purpose is to find how topics were developed through time, by whom and how they interact between themselves.
Our weapon of choice for the research on academic papers at this step was Web of Science (WoS): its database high compatibility and consistency about metadata over all articles made it easy to analyse and index when dealing with large numbers of articles. Our query was "open access publishing" searched into english language WoS Core Collection, which gave 811 articles as a result. We looked into abstracts in order to find potential off topic articles and all metadata was downloaded. With the help of software Vos Viewer we compiled a database cleaned from duplications and with all synonims unified; then we binary-counted all terms and expressions which appear in 15+ articles. Vos Viewer assigns a relevance score based on a semantic and citation algorithm.
Selecting the main topics extracting from this research, we refined the main query with other seven topics:
“business model, subscription, copyright, discipline, peer review, impact and repository”.
We processed the metadata extracted from these seven different queries with the software CitNetExplorer, creating a network of citacions based on topic and year between these articles. Successively we refined this network with Gephi structuring it in function of time and query, adding the variable of topic.
The visualisation is oriented through time on the X axis, from left to right, on the Y axis is divided on queries (or topics). Each balloon represents an article from a specific author, its size is directly proportional to its influence, while lines are the citations between articles. Colours represent the field of study of a single article.
This visualisation shows us that topics like “business model” and “discipline” although being present from the start, never became the central controversy on Open Access; Copyright and Repository are a stable topic, still it remains on a secondary level.
Impact factor is not too much debated nowadays, but the few authors talking about it gain a high relevance.
The debate over the subscription methods opposing Open Acess is strong and stable enough across the last decade, the main topic however is peer review, a controversial theme present from the start that doesn’t lose author’s attention through time.
Another interesting feature of these articles is that authors are not confined into a single discussion, they cover almost everyone of our analysed topics, some of them standing out, especially Bjork, Solomon and Laakso.
