An altmetric attention advantage for open access books in the humanities and social sciences

Abstract

The last de ade has seen two signif ant phenomena emerge in resear h ommuni ation: the rise of open a ess (OA) publishing, and eviden e of online sharing in the form of altmetri s. There has been limited examination of the efe t of OA on online sharing for journal arti les, and little for books. This paper examines the altmetri s of a set of 32,222 books (of whi h 5% are OA) and a set of 220,527 hapters (of whi h 7% are OA) indexed by the s holarly database Dimensions in the So ial S ien es and Humanities. Both OA books and hapters have signif antly higher use on so ial networks, higher overage in the mass media and blogs, and eviden e of higher rates of so ial impa t in poli y do uments. OA hapters have higher rates of overage on Wikipedia than their non-OA equivalents, and are more likely to be shared on Mendeley. Even within the Humanities and So ial S ien es, dis iplinary diferen es in altmetri a tivity are evident. The efe t is onfrmed for hapters, although sampling issues prevent the strong on lusion that OA fa ilitates extra attention at whole book level, the apparent OA altmetri s advantage suggests that the move towards OA is in reasing so ial sharing and broader impa t. Introdu tionTwo of t e largest p enomena in scientific communication in t e last decade ave been t e rise of Open Access (OA) journal publications, and t e researc area known as altmetrics. OA publications are t ose t at are freely available on t e internet, via a range of routes. Altmetrics is t e collection, reporting and analysis of attention being paid to researc publications across a variety of online platforms.Books and book c apters are under-represented in t e growing corpus of researc on OA. It as been suggested t at t is as arisen due to t e general lack of attention paid to bot t e book form, and also t e Arts and Humanities disciplines -w ic tend to favour books as t eir preferred c annel for publis ing researc .In general, t e absence of sales figures, reliable metadata, download figures and t e relatively slow citation performance of books as made a comparative study of OA versus non-OA books and c apters c allenging. T e relative paucity of data may ave contributed to a low level of examination in t e scientometric literature, and as suc , t ere is a lack of compelling evidence to drive t e adoption of OA for books and c apters.An emerging literature examining t e effect on social s aring and broader impact on OA journal articles offers some met odological insig ts, but given t e known differences

The societal impact of Open Science–a scoping review

“…They are also more present in news outlets (197,(202)(203)(204), are engaged with more on Mendeley (195,198,200), and are more often referenced on Wikipedia (205) compared to closed-access articles. Similar patterns are observed for books across the same platforms and outlets (206)(207)(208).…”

Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow: five altmetric sources observed over a decade show evolving trends, by research age, attention source maturity and open access status

“… Average values for the two high-frequency attention sources, Mendeley readers and unique Twitter accounts. To compare OA and non-OA papers, percentage coverage and average values were calculated for OA and non-OA papers (as above), with the value for the OA cohort being divided by the non-OA cohort to calculate an OAAA (Taylor, 2020 ). …”

“…The COVID-19 crisis of 2020-21 is seen as having further driven the adoption, acceptability and internationality of OA publishing (Lee and Haupt, 2020). Recent investigations have focused on the so-called Open Access Altmetrics Advantage (OAAA), finding OA articles (Holmberg, Hedman, Bowman, Didegah & Laakso 2020) and OA books (Taylor, 2020) tend to receive higher rates of social media and public engagement than non-OA research, Nevertheless, there are both disciplines and attention sources with an Open Access Altmetrics Disadvantage (OAAD), for example Psychology research articles linked on Twitter (Holmberg, Hedman, Bowman, Didegah & Laakso 2020) or Humanities books cited in Wikipedia (Taylor, 2020).…”

Making science public: a review of journalists’ use of Open Access research

“…This hypothesis is partially supported by existing evidence. Some studies suggest that OA publications receive more news coverage, on average, than their non-OA counterparts (e.g., Taylor, 2020 ; Wang et al , 2015 ; Torres-Salinas et al , 2020 ), while others find no evidence of such an “altmetric attention advantage” in news coverage (e.g., Alhoori et al ., 2015 ). These seemingly conflicting findings may, in part, be explained by the alternative strategies journalists have developed for accessing paywalled research articles, such as obtaining copies direct from authors ( De Dobbelaer et al ., 2018 ; Schultz, 2023 ), using subscription databases to which their institutions have access ( Boss et al ., 2022 ), and relying on free summaries or abstracts rather than complete papers ( Bray, 2019 ).…”