NewsByte

Around 29 per cent of scientific papers are published in open access publications, according to Scopus data analysed by the European Commission.

The US is spending $476 billion on R&D every year, according to data from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. China comes in second with a total expenditure of $371 billion.

EU member states are spending a total of $386 billion, excluding the European Commission's research and innovation programme, Horizon 2020.  

Strong spending by the business sector is an underlying factor for success, UNESCO says, as 71.5 per cent of R&D investments in the US come from the private sector. That share is slightly bigger in China, where businesses account for 77.3 per cent of the total R&D spending.  

The number of Austrian innovative companies is growing, as 62 per cent of companies are “innovation-active”, according to the latest data from Austria’s statistics office. The number of companies that come up with innovative products grew from 31 per cent in 2010 to 34 per cent in 2016. The number of "process innovators" grew from 33 to 36 per cent.  Also, Austrian companies are spurring more organisational and marketing innovations.

In Nature magazine’s index of earth and environmental science publications, annual production from China has been climbing fast since 2012. In fact, other Nature data show the Chinese Academy of Sciences is now the world’s top producer of green science.