Connecting scientific advances and patented technologies: The role of open access scientific publishing in clean-technology innovation

Getting to a net-zero economy requires faster development and diffusion of novel clean energy technologies. Understanding how the characteristics of scientific publications, such as the degree of accessibility, impact the development of technological innovations is critical. Yet, empirically establishing the links between scientific research and technological application (often studied using patents) is a highly under-researched area due to its complexity. Combining data science methods, machine learning, and econometrics, we develop and apply a novel approach to assess the determinants of the probability with which scientific discoveries (codified in scientific articles) are used in four major types of clean energy patents (i.e., batteries, biofuel, solar power, and wind power). We use data from more than 100,000 scientific articles and over 600,000 patents from these four technology categories for the period 2005 to 2018. Based on this data we first evaluate whether the diffusion time between scientific publishing and patented technologies has changed. We then investigate the effects of the characteristics of scientific articles on the probability that an article will be used in a patent as measured by citations in the non-patent literature. We also evaluate the effects of the characteristics of scientific articles that have been used by patents on the actual influence of the patent itself on other patents. We find that that the average lag between the publication of the scientific article and the citation of the patent has sharply decreased from on average 5-6 years in 2005 to less than 2 years in 2013. We also find that the most important predictor of whether a scientific article is used in a patent is whether it can be assessed without a paywall. In addition, we find that scientific articles that are cited more often by other scientific articles also lead to more influential patents. Our results indicate that the current scientific publication market structure – characterised by an oligopoly of publishers primarily relying on subscriptions from universities – is associated with a small but adverse effect on clean-tech innovation. Our results have profound implications for the transition to a carbon net-zero economy and could also have wider implications in other sectors (such as pharmaceuticals and biotechnology).