Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jun 1, 2022
Open Peer Review Period: Jun 1, 2022 - Jul 27, 2022
Date Accepted: Jul 28, 2022
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Tracking openness and topic evolution of COVID-19 publications: a comprehensive analysis (January 2020- March 2021)
ABSTRACT
Background:
The COVID-19 outbreak showed the importance of rapid access to research.
Objective:
This paper investigates research communication about this disease, the level of openness of papers, and the main topics of research into this disease.
Methods:
Thus, it analyses Open Access (OA) uptake (typologies, licence use) and the topic evolution of publications, from the start of the pandemic (1 January 2020) until the end of a year of widespread lockdown (1 March 2021).
Results:
The sample includes 95,605 publications; 94.1% were published for open access, 44% of them in Bronze OA. 42% do not have a licence, which can limit the number of citations, and thus impact. We also illustrated an approach that uses a topic modelling method and found that publications in Hybrid and Green OA publications are more focused on patients and their effects whereas the strategy adopted by countries is studied more in papers that have chosen the Gold OA route.
Conclusions:
The study concludes that although OA scientific production has increased, some weaknesses in Open Access practise, such as lack of licensing or under-researched topics, still hold back its effective use to further research.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.