UK-based startup Mendeley has published the Global Research Report, which reportedly reveals which countries study the hardest, and why open access (OA) is critical for lower-income countries. The report seeks to provide an analysis of 2 million scholars’ research activity in relation to economic indicators and research productivity. It draws on the usage statistics of Mendeley's desktop and cloud-based research collaboration platform, which is used by academics in the sciences and humanities in over 180 countries to manage their research workflows.
The report reveals the extent to which a country's GDP per capita and R&D expenditure per capita limit its researchers' access to academic papers. To afford each of their researchers’ access to an additional 50 research papers, developing countries require a ten-fold increase in R&D expenditure per capita. This is seen to highlight the importance of the recent trend towards OA publishing for making researchers in developing countries more competitive.
The data also demonstrates that having less access to research papers restricts daily studying time, which in turn is linked to a country's research productivity. The higher the daily studying time, the more citable publications and Nobel laureates a country produces.
Finally, the Global Research Report provides rankings on which countries, world regions and universities are reading the most academic papers and spending the most time per day studying the literature. On a global average, an academic's research paper collection contains 142.8 documents, the report says.
