TY - JOUR
T1 - Open access and international co-authorship: a longitudinal study of the United Arab Emirates research output
AU - Boufarss, Mohamed
AU - Laakso, Mikael
N1 - Funding Information:
The UAE research landscape presents some unique characteristics, including, but not limited to, the country being only around 50 years old, a high transient research community with temporary residency status (the oldest university being only around 46 years old), and a nonhomogeneous multilingual population. All these factors have a direct impact on research output. However, the situation is set to change in the UAE as the national science policy is being geared towards increased scientific output (Boufarss & Laakso, 2020). This direction started with the launch of UAE Vision 2021, followed by the release of the UAE Innovation Strategy, the National Strategy for Higher Education 2030, the announcement of the National Advanced Sciences Agenda 2031, the Research and Development (R&D) Governance Policy, and finally by the recently launched Golden Visa scheme, aiming to attract and retain outstanding researchers. Furthermore, initiatives that aim to provide funding for research were launched recently and include, among many others, the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Knowledge Foundation, the National Research Foundation, the Abu Dhabi Research and Development Authority, the Advanced Technology Research Council, and the Abu Dhabi Ghadan 21 Research and Development funds. The Research and Development Governance Policy lists among its aims to “foster an agile, robust national ecosystem for research and development in the UAE” and “set standards to improve research, elevate the performance of the national R&D activities.” These policies and initiatives are likely to have had a visible impact on scientific research output. A Clarivate Analytics (2019) report estimated that UAE research articles indexed in the WoS Core Collection increased by 450% between 2008 and 2018. The same Clarivate report states that the UAE is part of the OA growth trend, with a gradual increase in the percentage of OA articles published in recent years.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Mohamed Boufarss and Mikael Laakso.
PY - 2023/4/14
Y1 - 2023/4/14
N2 - This study investigates the interplay between open access (OA), co-authorship, and international research collaboration. While previous research has dealt with these factors separately, there is a knowledge gap in how these interact within a single dataset. The data includes all Scopus-indexed journal articles published over 11 years (2009–2019) where at least one of the authors has an affiliation to a United Arab Emirates (UAE) institution (30 400 articles in total). For assessment of OA status of articles, the study utilized Unpaywall data for articles with a digital object identifier, and manual web searches for articles without. There was consistently strong growth in publication volume counts as well as shares of OA articles across the years. The analysis provides statistically significant results supporting a positive relationship between a higher number of co-authors, in particular international, and OA status of articles. Further research is needed to investigate potentially explaining factors for the relationship between co-authorship and increased OA rate such as e.g., implementation of national science policy initiatives, varying availability of funding for OA publishing in different countries, patterns in adoption of various OA types in different co-authorship constellations, and potentially unique discipline-specific patterns as they relate to co-authorship and OA rate.
AB - This study investigates the interplay between open access (OA), co-authorship, and international research collaboration. While previous research has dealt with these factors separately, there is a knowledge gap in how these interact within a single dataset. The data includes all Scopus-indexed journal articles published over 11 years (2009–2019) where at least one of the authors has an affiliation to a United Arab Emirates (UAE) institution (30 400 articles in total). For assessment of OA status of articles, the study utilized Unpaywall data for articles with a digital object identifier, and manual web searches for articles without. There was consistently strong growth in publication volume counts as well as shares of OA articles across the years. The analysis provides statistically significant results supporting a positive relationship between a higher number of co-authors, in particular international, and OA status of articles. Further research is needed to investigate potentially explaining factors for the relationship between co-authorship and increased OA rate such as e.g., implementation of national science policy initiatives, varying availability of funding for OA publishing in different countries, patterns in adoption of various OA types in different co-authorship constellations, and potentially unique discipline-specific patterns as they relate to co-authorship and OA rate.
KW - 520 Other social sciences
KW - open access
KW - coauthorship
KW - international collaboration
KW - UAE
KW - Scopus
KW - Scientometrics
KW - 518 Media and communications
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85165937940&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1162/qss_a_00256
DO - 10.1162/qss_a_00256
M3 - Article
SN - 2641-3337
VL - 4
SP - 372
EP - 393
JO - Quantitative Science Studies
JF - Quantitative Science Studies
IS - 2
ER -