Open Access Improves the Dissemination of Science: Insights from Wikipedia

TL;DR

It is revealed that Wikipedia relies on open access articles at a higher overall rate compared to their availability in the Web of Science and OpenAlex compared to their availability in the Web of Science and OpenAlex, and open access articles contribute to the reliability of Wikipedia as a source by affording editors timely access to novel results.

Abstract

Wikipedia is a well-known platform for disseminating knowledge, and scientific sources, such as journal articles, play a critical role in supporting its mission. The open access movement aims to make scientific knowledge openly available, and we might intuitively expect open access to help further Wikipedia's mission. However, the extent of this relationship remains largely unknown. To fill this gap, we analyze a large dataset of citations from the English Wikipedia and model the role of open access in Wikipedia's citation patterns. We find that both the accessibility (open access status) and academic impact (citation count) significantly increase the probability of an article being cited on Wikipedia. Specifically, open-access articles are extensively and increasingly more cited in Wikipedia, as they show an approximately 64.7% higher likelihood of being cited in Wikipedia when compared to closed-access articles, after controlling for confounding factors. This open-access citation effect is particularly strong for articles with high citation counts and published in recent years. Our findings highlight the pivotal role of open access in facilitating the dissemination of scientific knowledge, thereby increasing the likelihood of open-access articles reaching a more diverse audience through platforms such as Wikipedia. Simultaneously, open-access articles contribute to the reliability of Wikipedia as a source by affording editors timely access to novel results.

Figures (10)

• Figure 1: Assumed causal structure of Wikipedia's OA citation adoption effect, with a black line representing an assumed causal relationship between two variables.
• Figure 2: Distribution of open access status by policy.
• Figure 3: Fraction of OA citations by publication date of citation. The grey bars represent the number of scientific articles cited by Wikipedia, grouped by their publication year. The green bars denote the number of OA articles among these cited articles. Both sets of bars utilize the left y-axis (Number of articles). The black line illustrates the percentage of OA articles concerning their publication year, calculated as the ratio of the green bar (Number of OA articles) to the grey bar (number of total articles). The black line employs the right y-axis (Fraction of OA).
• Figure 4: Distribution of OA status and count of citations by OpenAlex concept. The blue bars depict the fraction of OA citations within each OpenAlex concept, while the red bars represent the fraction of closed articles. The black dotted line indicates the overall percentage of OA articles in our Wikipedia dataset, and the black star signifies the percentage of OA articles by concepts in the entire OpenAlex dataset. The right chart displays the number of citations for each concept in Wikipedia, with the concepts arranged in order based on the number of citations.
• Figure 5: OA adoption effect at varying citation counts, based on model 2.