No abstract

No abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, when individuals were confronted with social distancing, social media served as a significant platform for expressing feelings and seeking emotional support. However, a group of automated actors known as social bots have been found to coexist with human users in discussions regarding the coronavirus crisis, which may pose threats to public health. To figure out how these actors distorted public opinion and sentiment expressions in the outbreak, this study selected three critical timepoints in the development of the pandemic and conducted a topic-based sentiment analysis for bot-generated and human-generated tweets. The findings show that suspected social bots contributed to as much as 9.27% of COVID-19 discussions on Twitter. Social bots and humans shared a similar trend on sentiment polarity—positive or negative—for almost all topics. For the most negative topics, social bots were even more negative than humans. Their sentiment expressions were weaker than those of humans for most topics, except for COVID-19 in the US and the healthcare system. In most cases, social bots were more likely to actively amplify humans’ emotions, rather than to trigger humans’ amplification. In discussions of COVID-19 in the US, social bots managed to trigger bot-to-human anger transmission. Although these automated accounts expressed more sadness towards health risks, they failed to pass sadness to humans.

No abstract

This paper reports the results of a survey on Chinese researchers' perceptions and use of open access journals (OAJs). A total of 381 Chinese researchers from different universities and disciplines were investigated through an online questionnaire survey in August and September 2018. The results showed that most Chinese researchers are familiar with and have positive attitude to OAJs. They know OAJs mainly through their peers, colleagues, and friends. PubMed Central, PLoS, and COAJ (China Open Access Journals) are the most well-known OAJ websites among Chinese researchers. As for use, most of the respondents read and cite OAJs frequently and have experience of publishing in OAJs. However, they strongly prefer to use OAJs indexed in reputable databases (e.g. Web of Science, WoS) when making publishing decisions. Significant differences can be seen among disciplines, with researchers in HSS areas using OAJs less frequently than researchers from other disciplines, although they have the same positive attitudes and are equally well informed about them. Younger researchers preferred to rely on prestigious institutions and authors when using OAJs.