Research On Knowledge Communication Of Open Access Journal

The idea of "Open Access" has been around for a long time, which means a new mode of information service by providing the full text for free. In the mode of open access, researchers can subscribe the full text of academic information freely. Recently, open access gets extensive support from various researchers. The development of open access lasts more than ten years, which begins from the first conference on open access in2002. As one of the main academic resources of open access, open access journal also grows. The development of open access journal is mainly caused by the crisis of the existing communication process of the traditional academic journals, as well as the emergence of computer and Internet. In the aspect of information acquisition, the release and acquisition of open access journal is mainly based on Internet, rather than the traditional printed format. In the aspect of acquisition cost, as the existence of open access journal, many journals can be achieved without payment and ordering. In the aspect of the efficiency of knowledge communication, open access journal improves the efficiency of knowledge communication largely, since it extends the authority of researchers on academic information without deteriorating intellectual property.With the characteristics of open access journal described above, the knowledge communication pattern between researchers has been changed a lot. As a new scheme of academic communication, open access changes the form and content of knowledge communication. Knowledge communication with printed journals and literatures still exists and plays an important position. However, with the development of Internet and information technologies, the patterns and channels of knowledge communication has been diversified. Open access journal becomes one of the important tools and ways of knowledge communication for the advantages of short time process, high efficiency and so on.Although the development of open access journal is considerably and dramatically fast, it lacks the systematic analysis of the internal structures, characteristics, subjects and knowledge communication patterns on open access journal. In this study, we aim to clarify the internal and external characteristics, as well as the disciplinary development and knowledge communication patterns of open access journal. Firstly, the distribution of type, publishing agency and application platform of open access journal are investigated and analyzed. Secondly, the basic theory of knowledge communication analysis is studied, which includes the nature of knowledge communication, the relevant theories and methods of knowledge communication analysis. Thirdly, the methods of knowledge communication analysis for open access journal by Scientometrics, Clustering and Association Rule Mining are proposed based on the characteristic of open access journal. Finally, all the literatures, references and cited articles of a representative open access journal in recent ten years are analyzed in the empirical study, so as to evaluate the effectiveness of all the methods of knowledge communication analysis for open access journal described above. The main content of this dissertation is as follows:Chapter1:Introduction. The research background, research significance, research status, research objectives, research contents, innovations, research methods, tools and technical route of this dissertation are introduced in this chapter.Chapter2:The general distribution of open access journal. In this chapter, the distribution of type, publishing agency and application platform of open access journal, as well as the distribution of open access journals in the Directory of open access (DOA J) are studied. The latter is mainly researched by statistical analysis from the perspective of amount, subject and location. The distribution of open access journals in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and their impact factors are also analyzed.Chapter3:The basic theory of research on knowledge communication. In this chapter, the nature of knowledge communication is firstly studied from the aspect of formation mechanism and type. Then, the effect of three theories, i.e., Scientometrics, Clustering and Association Rule Mining on knowledge communication is analyzed. Finally, the development, definition, concept and general process of those three theories are reviewed in detail.Chapter4:The methods of knowledge communication analysis for open access journal. In this chapter, the characteristic of open access journal is summarized firstly, which includes the amount and quality of open access journal, and the characteristic of open access journal in the process of knowledge communication. Then, the methods of knowledge communication analysis for open access journal based on Scientometrics, Clustering and Association Rule Mining are proposed by exploiting the characteristic of open access journal.Chapter5:The empirical study of knowledge communication analysis for open access journal. In this chapter, the selection criterion of research object and the method of downloading the data set are firstly introduced. Then, the experimental results of the sources of knowledge and knowledge diffusion of open access journal are analyzed, in which all the methods of knowledge communication analysis for open access journal proposed in chapter4are compared and evaluated by multiple experiments.Chapter6:Summary and Prospects. In this chapter, the research results are reviewed and summarized firstly, and then the shortcomings are illustrated. Finally, the directions and topics of our future research are discussed.The innovation of this study includes four aspects, as follows: Firstly, the distribution status of open access journal is systematic researched. Statistical analysis is conducted from the perspective of amount, subject, location, impact factor and so on, which can help to clarify the internal and external characteristics, as well as the disciplinary development of open access journal.Secondly, the relevant theory of knowledge communication analysis is investigated and analyzed, which includes Scientometrics, Clustering and Association Rule Mining. The sources of knowledge and knowledge diffusion are automatically classified by Clustering, which can be used to mine the internal information and knowledge, as well as to understand the formation and derivation pattern of a knowledge area. The association analysis of knowledge communication is conducted by Association Rule Mining, which can be used to discover the pivotal sources and diffusion groups of knowledge. It is helpful to extend the perspective of the study on knowledge communication analysis by exploiting the above cross-interdisciplinary theory.Thirdly, two new indicators (i.e., CF and WCF) are proposed based on the characteristic of open access journal, which are applied to the methods of knowledge communication analysis for open access journal. The algorithm of Clustering is improved by CF and WCF, from which we can get a better representative of the intrinsic knowledge communication for open access journal, and increase the discrimination of each cluster. Those indicators are also applied to improve the algorithm of Association Rule Mining, from which we can quantify the importance of each item in the pivotal sources and diffusion groups of knowledge.Finally, a tool of collecting all information of open access journal from the Directory of open access (DOAJ) is developed, which can be used to analyze the distribution status of open access journal from the aspects of subject, impact factor and so on. We also develop a tool of collecting and analyzing the full text of literatures, references and cited articles from the database of PubMed Central. The tool can be used to provide the data set of knowledge communication analysis for open access journal.