An altmetric attention advantage for open access books in the humanities and social sciences
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An altmetric attention advantage for open access books in the humanities and social sciences Michael Taylor1 Received: 8 May 2020 © Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2020
Abstract The last decade has seen two significant phenomena emerge in research communication: the rise of open access (OA) publishing, and the easy availability of evidence of online sharing in the form of altmetrics. There has been limited examination of the effect of OA on online sharing for journal articles, and little for books. This paper examines the altmetrics of a set of 32,222 books (of which 5% are OA) and a set of 220,527 chapters (of which 7% are OA) indexed by the scholarly database Dimensions in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Both OA books and chapters have significantly higher use on social networks, higher coverage in the mass media and blogs, and evidence of higher rates of social impact in policy documents. OA chapters have higher rates of coverage on Wikipedia than their non-OA equivalents, and are more likely to be shared on Mendeley. Even within the Humanities and Social Sciences, disciplinary differences in altmetric activity are evident. The effect is confirmed for chapters, although sampling issues prevent the strong conclusion that OA facilitates extra attention at the whole book level, the apparent OA altmetrics advantage suggests that the move towards OA is increasing social sharing and broader impact. Keywords Open access · Altmetrics · Scientometrics · Monographs · Scholarly books · Social impact
Introduction Two important recent phenomena in scientific communication have been the rise of Open Access (OA) journal publications, and—in the last decade—the widespread availability of altmetrics. OA publications are those that are available on the internet, without charge. Altmetrics report the attention paid to research publications through online platforms. Books and book chapters are under-represented in the growing corpus of research on OA and altmetrics, with almost nothing investigating the combination. This is an important limitation because arts, social science and humanities disciplines tend to favour books as their
* Michael Taylor [email protected] 1
Digital Science, University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, UK
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preferred channel for publishing research, and tend to cover topics with a public interest dimension, such as law, cultural studies, and socio-economic policies. In general, the absence of reliable public sales figures, rich and open metadata, download figures and the relatively slow citation performance of books make a comparative study of OA versus non-OA books and chapters challenging. A growing literature examining the effect on social sharing and broader impact on OA journal articles offers some methodological insights but, given the known differences between journal articles and books, does not offer any results that may be extrapolated to books. This research uses two new data sources (Unpaywall, Dimensions) that contain more data about bo
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