Evaluating the relationship between the academic and social impact of open access books based on citation behaviors and social media attention

Abstract

Open access academic achievements include not only papers and journals, but also books, which have become an important achievement for scholars and can be regarded as scholarly critical products. Until recently, books have had a key role in the distribution of knowledge and the main issue is which category of open or non-open access books is more effective in academic society. Thus, this study compares the difference between open access and non-open access books in terms of knowledge distribution. We collected and analyzed data from Twitter, Mendeley, and Dimensions platform, as well as the dataset of all Springer books. Twitter and Mendeley are considered alternative metric indicators, which reflect impacts with citation indicators. Data were analyzed from static and comparative perspectives. Results showed a relationship between academic impact and social impact based on citation and social media attention for OA books, and indicated that open access books boost knowledge distribution in Twitter and Mendeley for the sample of books drawn from Springer under study. Moreover, the open access books have the added advantage of keeping sustained impact for a long time. It is sensible to assess the impact of OA books through knowledge distribution. However, there is no significant correlation between citation and social media attention regarding OA books and also the social and academic impact of books in some disciplines such as Geography, Medicine, and Public Health, Culture, and Media Studies attract more social media attention. According to the analysis, the correlation with citations for the number of mentions on social media is negligible, which indicates that social media measures bear different impacts from citations. However, social impact is similar to the complementary measures which should be considered within the impact evaluation of OA books. Therefore, only when OA books are accessed through the channels of communication can the knowledge contained in books be absorbed to generate impact, and lowering the access barrier does lead to more attention found for OA research papers. The findings demonstrated that the OA books and OA papers do not have similar impacts on the citation. Also, OA books could not attract more citations than non-OA books in some disciplines, which is why open access books have a significant impact on social media attention.