To What Extent Does the Open Access Status of Articles Predict Their Social Media Visibility? A Case Study of Life Sciences and Biomedicine

Abstract

This study aimed to determine whether, and to what extent, the OA status and OA type of articles can predict their social media visibility, when controlling for a considerable number of important factors. Those factors, which previous research confirmed their positive association with altmetric counts, were journal impact, individual collaboration, research funding, number of MESH topics, topic, international collaboration, lay summary, being a mega journal, F1000 Score, and gender of first and last authors. The data for this study comprised 83,444 articles and reviews in the research area of Life Sciences and Biomedicine from 2012-2016, retrieved from Medline in November 2018. The results showed that the percentage of OA articles mentioned on altmetric platforms was significantly higher than those of the non-OA articles. Furthermore, Open Access was significantly associated with a higher probability of a paper being mentioned on the studied social media platforms. Compared to non-OA articles, the OA articles had a higher average of tweets, Facebooks posts, news posts, and blog posts. By increase of a unit in the OA status, the average number of tweets, Facebooks posts, news posts, and blog posts increased by 92.7%, 25.7%, 83.9% and 48.4%, respectively. Regarding the OA types (studied as Gold vs non-Gold), our findings showed that the Gold OA articles had a higher average number of Tweets and a higher probability of being mentioned in tweets and blogs.

News media attention in Climate Action: latent topics and open access

“…This finding is interesting as it might show the potential role of open access in fast dissemination of the scientific research in Climate Action to a broader community via news outlets. The finding with regard the news count advantage of OA papers is in line with Dehdarirad and Didegah (2020) for articles in life science and biomedicine, and Holmberg et al (2020), who found OA news count advantage in some fields in Finish research publications.…”

“…Regarding journal characteristics, journal impact as SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper) and being a mega journal were considered, as they have been shown to be important factors for altmetrics counts (Didegah et al, 2018;Dehdarirad & Didegah, 2020;Dehdarirad, 2020). For each article, the SNIP values were downloaded from SciVal.…”

“…Funding has been previously shown to have an association with the altmetrics counts of scientific articles (Álvarez-Bornstein & Costas, 2018;Didegah et al, 2018). Readability covariates For readability we used 'abstract readability' and 'lay summary' which according to previous research were found to be associated with altmetrics counts received or news coverage of an article (Guerini et al, 2012;MacLaughlin et al, 2018;Dehdarirad & Didegah, 2020).…”

All the research that’s fit to print: Open access and the news media

“…In a comparison of one gold OA physics journal to one paywalled physics journals, Robinson-García et al (2018) found that gold OA articles received a mean of 1.22 news and blog mentions, more than paywalled (a mean of 0.23 news and blog mentions) and green OA (0.22 news and blog mentions), although it did not separate out news mentions from blog posts. A study of life sciences and biomedicine articles found both a positive correlation for the OA status of an article when looking at the likelihood of an article receiving any news mention and the number of news mentions received (Dehdarirad & Didegah, 2020).…”

Are journal archiving and embargo policies impeding the success of India's open access policy?

“…A study on 1761 Nature Communications articles demonstrates that OA articles received more citations and page views, more numbers downloads over a longer period, and also draws more social media attention (Twitter and Facebook) as compared to non‐OA articles (Emery et al, 2021; Wang et al, 2015). Another article shows that a paper being open makes the probability of the paper being mentioned on the social media platforms used in the study (Dehdarirad & Didegah, 2020). Since literature studies support OA papers' more significant visibility theory, it is safe to assume that Indian authors can draw more attention towards their research by self‐archiving their papers in IR even if they publish in subscription/hybrid journals instead of paying APC.…”