Abstract
In this study we investigated whether open access could assist the broader dissemination of scientific research in Climate Action (Sustainable Development Goal 13) via news outlets. We did this by comparing (i) the share of open and non-open access documents in different Climate Action topics, and their news counts, and (ii) the mean of news counts for open access and non-open access documents. The data set of this study comprised 70,206 articles and reviews in Sustainable Development Goal 13, published during 2014–2018, retrieved from SciVal. The number of news mentions for each document was obtained from Altmetrics Details Page API using their DOIs, whereas the open access statuses were obtained using Unpaywall.org. The analysis in this paper was done using a combination of (Latent Dirichlet allocation) topic modelling, descriptive statistics, and regression analysis. The covariates included in the regression analysis were features related to authors, country, journal, institution, funding, readability, news source category and topic. Using topic modelling, we identified 10 topics, with topics 4 (meteorology) [21%], 5 (adaption, mitigation, and legislation) [18%] and 8 (ecosystems and biodiversity) [14%] accounting for 53% of the research in Sustainable Development Goal 13. Additionally, the results of regression analysis showed that while keeping all the variables constant in the model, open access papers in Climate Action had a news count advantage (8.8%) in comparison to non-open access papers. Our findings also showed that while a higher share of open access documents in topics such as topic 9 (Human vulnerability to risks) might not assist with its broader dissemination, in some others such as topic 5 (adaption, mitigation, and legislation), even a lower share of open access documents might accelerate its broad communication via news outlets.
Highlights
News outlets play an important role in increasing the public’s knowledge, engagement with, and understanding of complex subjects in science, technology and policy
Our findings showed that while a higher share of open access documents in topics such as topic 9 (Human vulnerability to risks) might not assist with its broader dissemination, in some others such as topic 5, even a lower share of open access documents might accelerate its broad communication via news outlets
Regarding the other variables controlled in the regression model, the results showed that SNIP, international collaboration, funding, and all news source categories had a positive association with the average news counts received by papers in Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 13
Summary
News outlets play an important role in increasing the public’s knowledge, engagement with, and understanding of complex subjects in science, technology and policy They are influential communicators of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), such as climate change (Boykoff & Luedecke, 2016). The results of some studies have shown that news media tends to focus on dramatic topics such as the ozone hole, extinction of species (Mazur, 1998), or hurricanes (Boykoff & Roberts, 2007) As another example, the media portrays climate change issues as uncertain or as a controversy, presenting both sides as credible (Somerville & Hassol, 2011; Brüggemann & Engesser, 2017)
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