The Nexus of Open Science and Innovation: Insights from Patent Citations

TL;DR

This study investigates how inventors rely on open science by analyzing patent citations to open access publications across disciplines, revealing a higher prevalence of open access sources in inventive activities.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that inventors preferentially cite open access publications in patents, highlighting the role of open science in innovation.

Findings

OA publications are 38% more cited in patents than in the general database.

In biology and medicine, OA citations are 73% and 27% higher respectively.

Disciplines like chemistry and computer science also favor OA citations in patents.

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the extent to which inventive activity relies on open science. In other words, it investigates whether inventors utilize Open Access (OA) publications more than subscription-based ones, especially given that some inventors may lack institutional access. To achieve this, we utilized the (Marx, 2023) database, which contains citations of patents to scientific publications (Non-Patent References-NPRs). We focused on publications closely related to invention, specifically those cited solely by inventors within the body of patent texts. Our dataset was supplemented by OpenAlex data. The final sample comprised 961,104 publications cited in patents, of which 861,720 had a DOI. Results indicate that across all disciplines, OA publications are 38% more prevalent in patent citations (NPRs) than in the overall OpenAlex database. In biology and medicine, inventors use 73% and 27% more OA publications, respectively, compared to closed-access ones. Chemistry and computer science are also disciplines where OA publications are more frequently utilized in patent contexts than subscription-based ones.