The Visualization Analysis Of Open Access Researches Based On Bibliometric Methods

The pricing crisis of academic journals which have occurred since the late1990’shave been severely hindering the widespread dissemination and communication ofscholarly information. The open access movement is booming all around the world soas to reduce or even eliminate its harmful effects. It is an idea of free and fair access toacademic resources as well as a publishing model in the internet context. In this mode, thepublic have equal and free access to scholars’ research findings. It could help improvethe visibility of scientific production, reduce the costs of academic exchanges. As aresult of these advantages and its catering to typical characteristics of informationcommunication in the network era, open access has been receiving more and moreattention from various countries and their researchers, followed by a lot of theoreticaland practical achievements on open access. Therefore, it is necessary to review them toreveal the status, hot topics, knowledge bases and problems of researches on openaccess at home and abroad. Based on the existing problems, many constructivesuggestions are proposed. Thus this article has important theoretical and practicalsignificance.Through various methods and means of bibliometric analysis and informationvisualization, such as word frequency analysis, co-citation analysis, citation analysis andsocial network analysis, this article examines in detail domestic and overseas literatures onopen access from the number, authors, journals, regions, institutions, countries, keywordsand references. Traditional two dimensional mappings or social network mappings basedon the changes of article numbers, author cooperation, regional cooperation, periodicaldistribution, keyword co-occurrence, document co-citation, national cooperation andinstitutional cooperation show us quantitative characteristics, core authors, productiveauthors, main academic groups, core journals, hot topics, productive regions, productiveinstitutions, productive countries and their collaborations, which reflect research progresseson open access at home and abroad.By comparison, domestic researches on open access had a later start, insufficientcooperation and communication, lower quality of scholarly findings. Moreover,researches in China paid less attention to solving practical problems and lacked ofsystematic or empirical discussions. To solve the above problems, five targetedproposals are given:①actively organize or participate in various academic activities with the subject of open access in order to strengthen collaborations and exchangesamong authors from different institutions, regions, or countries;②improve the depthand breadth of domestic researches, combined with Chinese specific conditions, to solvepractical problems encountered in the promotion of open access;③combine synchronicand diachronic methods to avoid overgeneralizations, and utilize more empiricalanalyses;④incorporate OA papers into our academic evaluation systems, and constructtheir peer-review mechanisms;⑤develop instructive policies or measures on thegovernment level to stimulate scholars’ enthusiasm. They will help construct anintegrated research framework on open access in China, thus accelerating the practicalapplications of open access.