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.
Highlights
The movement towards providing open access to research outputs was initiated with the Budapest Open Access (OA) Initiative in 2002 (Chan et al 2002; Piwowar et al 2018) and it has been widely accepted as a desirable phenomenon and has become a reality in many academic spheres (Kriegeskorte et al 2012)
The results of the two proportion tests showed that the percentage of OA articles mentioned on altmetrics platforms was significantly higher than that of the non-OA articles [P < 0.0001]
The findings of our study revealed that the percentage of Life Sciences and Biomedicine OA articles mentioned on social media platforms was significantly higher than that of non-OA articles
Summary
The movement towards providing open access to research outputs was initiated with the Budapest Open Access (OA) Initiative in 2002 (Chan et al 2002; Piwowar et al 2018) and it has been widely accepted as a desirable phenomenon and has become a reality in many academic spheres (Kriegeskorte et al 2012). Publications published in a full open access journal are called Gold OA Green publications are those where a preprint version of the article is made available in, for example, an institutional repository. In the hybrid OA model, publishers publish OA articles in closed-access scholarly journals, after authors have paid article processing charge (APC) (Kanjilal & Das 2015). Bronze publications are those articles made available freely to read on the publisher’s website, without an explicit Open license (Piwowar et al 2018)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
