Impact in Action: Understanding open access content usage as it occurs

Promoting the broadest possible public access to published research is the core mission of any open access publisher worthy of an author’s time and consideration. If we are to meet the call for “concrete steps to open up research” driven by this year’s Open Access Week, however, we have to support authors, their advocates and institutions in understanding the impact of the research as it occurs. This means providing measures of article usage from the standard citation, downloads and accesses to understanding media coverage, article sharing, and other references that put that usage in context.
We know that there is a correlation between increased citation and media hit rates of research that publishes with open access. For usage alone, the Wellcome Trust in the UK found open access articles had 89% more downloads than funded articles published in publications with controlled access. In order to support the ongoing and wider adoption of open research, it helps to know where and how articles are being used and referred to via various measures of engagement.
A relatively recent article in Marine Biodiversity Records provides a good example of open access content in action. Published in June of this year, “A lionfish (Pterois miles) invasion has begun in the Mediterranean Sea”, received wide spread media attention upon publication due to the public interest in the article’s subject. As shared in the metrics on the article page on the journal website, we know that th...

Source: BioMed Central Blog - October 27, 2016 Category: Journals (General) Authors: Dylan Parker Tags: Open Access Publishing altmetric open access week 2016 Source Type: blogs