Highlights
- The paper examines OA effect when a journal provides two types of link to the same subscription article: OA and paid content.
- OA links perform better than paid content links. When not indicating the OA status of a link, the performance drops greatly.
- OA benefits all countries, but its positive impact is slightly greater for developed countries.
- Combining social media dissemination with OA appears to enhance the reach of scientific information.
This interesting paper reflects on the interaction between the use of social media and papers that are open access. #SpoilerAlert this paper suggests that the use of both does have a positive effect on the impact of a paper. This is an interesting topic for those of us that advise on maximising the impact of research outputs. We have included links to a trove of related items.
Scholarly journals are increasingly using social media to share their latest research publications and communicate with their readers. Having a presence on social media gives journals a platform to raise their profile and promote their content. This study compares the number of clicks received when journals provide two types of links to subscription articles: open access (OA) and paid content links. We examine the OA effect using unique matched-pair data for the journal Nature Materials. Our study finds that OA links perform better than paid content links. In particular, when the journal does not indicate that a link to an article is an OA link, there is an obvious drop in performance against clicks on links indicating OA status. OA has a positive effect on the number of clicks in all countries, but its positive impact is slightly greater in developed countries. The results suggest that free content is more attractive to users than paid content. Social media exposure of scholarly articles promotes the use of research outputs. Combining social media dissemination with OA appears to enhance the reach of scientific information. However, extensive further efforts are needed to remove barriers to OA.
Keywords
Altmetrics, Matched-pair analysis, Open access, Social media exposure, Shortlinks, Twitter.
Huixu Li, Lanjian Liu & Xianwen Wang. (2021) The open access effect in social media exposure of scholarly articles: A matched-pair analysis, Journal of Informetrics, Volume 15, Issue 3, 2021, 101154
Publisher (Elsevier): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1751157721000250
