A Bibliometric study of the Literature of Open Science & Open Access

One of the necessary cultural changes on the way to Open Science is the commitment to its principles. Both the LIBER and LERU Roadmaps underline the importance of adopting consistent and robust practices that exemplify the benefits of Open Science. However, in the past several contradictions have been recorded, like for instance that many readers have encountered access fees on articles that discuss Open Access issues, as those were published in paywalled journals. It is important that every part of the discourse for Open Science to remain open and accessible to anyone who wishes to contribute. Therefore, gradually and steadily, a question is raised: what are the attributes of the literature about Open Access and Open Science?

In this paper, we performed a three-tiered micro-analysis study of 2390 publications that focus on Open Science and Open Access, as indexed in Web of Science, in order to see how this literature has developed over the last twenty years. Initially, we were interested in finding how many of these publications were published openly and in which version, namely green, gold or bronze. However, using the open programming language Python, we conducted analyses to further explore the landscape of this literature and we were able to find the key figures that describe its growth rate and several other statistical measures on information, like the main journal venues and authors. We also calculated statistical measures of the types of these publications and whether they were financially supported or not. In the second tier of our analysis, we produced timelines that reflect the temporal progress of authors, journals and descriptors, starting from a time point shortly after the Santa Fe Declaration of Open Access. Finally, in the third tier, we produced networks of entities and performed analyses to identify the main authorship models, which together with other indicators, show if collaboration fosters in this literature and how its main entities are linked together. The study offers a thorough and detailed view on the bibliometric aspects of the “Open” literature conducted by open, transparent and reproducible tools.