Do articles in open access journals have more frequent altmetric activity than articles in subscription-based journals? An investigation of the research output of Finnish universities

Abstract

Scientific articles available in Open Access (OA) have been found to attract more citations and online attention to the extent that it has become common to speak about OA Altmetrics Advantage. This research investigates how the OA Altmetrics Advantage holds for a specific case of research articles, namely the research outputs from universities in Finland. Furthermore, this research examines disciplinary and platform specific differences in that (dis)advantage. The new methodological approaches developed in this research focus on relative visibility, i.e. how often articles in OA journals receive at least one mention on the investigated online platforms, and relative receptivity, i.e. how frequently articles in OA journals gain mentions in comparison to articles in subscription-based journals. The results show significant disciplinary and platform specific differences in the OA advantage, with articles in OA journals within for instance veterinary sciences, social and economic geography and psychology receiving more citations and attention on social media platforms, while the opposite was found for articles in OA journals within medicine and health sciences. The results strongly support field-and platform-specific considerations when assessing the influence of journal OA status on altmetrics. The new methodological approaches used in this research will serve future comparative research into OA advantage of scientific articles over time and between countries.

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

“…Embargos on Green OA is an example of an access barrier (Laakso 2014). Our findings contradicted that of Holmberg et al (2020), who found that Gold OA publications had no Twitter advantage for Finnish publications within Medicine and Health Sciences. The difference may result from the different samples studied, especially as Holmberg et al (2020) investigated a sample of Finnish articles indexed in a national database.…”

Emerging Online Tools and Platforms for Scholarly Activities

“…The importance of altmetric analyses becomes evident in the COVID-19 pandemic when social media platforms enable processing and distinguishing the most influential articles much faster than established citation databases like Scopus and Web of Science [23,24]. The digitization and Open Access movement positively influence the immediacy effect of social media activities [25,26]. In fact, social media posts with Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) and links to public archiving sites such as PubMed Central attract societal attention to scholarly articles and increase citations across medical and allied health disciplines [27,28].…”

Only two out of five articles by New Zealand researchers are free-to-access: a multiple API study of access, citations, cost of Article Processing Charges (APC), and the potential to increase the proportion of open access

“…Different methods are used according to the aims of the research. Some studies focus on a given country (Abediyarandi & Mayr 2019;Bosman & Kramer 2019;Holmberg et al 2019;Mikki et al 2018;Piryani et al 2019;Pölönen et al 2019;Sivertsen et al 2019) open access type (Wang et al 2018) or funder (Kirkman 2018). Others aim for a global overview (Archambault et al 2014;Laakso et al 2011;Martín-Martín et al 2018;Piwowar et al 2018;Robinson-Garcia et al 2020Wang et al 2018.…”