Research Article: “The Open Access Advantage Considering Citation, Article Usage and Social Media Attention”

The following article was recently posted on the web site of Scientometrics, a journal published by Springer.
We are providing a link to the full text article provided by the authors on arXiv about a week after the Springer version became available (March 19, 2015).
Title
The Open Access Advantage Considering Citation, Article Usage and Social Media Attention
Authors
Xianwen Wang
Chen Liu
Wenli Mao
Zhichao Fang
Affiliation of All Authors:
WISE Lab, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116085, China
Source
Scientometrics (via arXiv Version)
Abstract

In this study, we compare the difference in the impact between open access (OA) and non-open access (non-OA) articles. 1761 Nature Communications articles published from 1 January 2012 to 31 August 2013 are selected as our research objects, including 587 OA articles and 1174 non-OA articles. Citation data and daily updated article-level metrics data are harvested directly from the platform of nature.com. Data is analyzed from the static versus temporal-dynamic perspectives. The OA citation advantage is confirmed, and the OA advantage is also applicable when extending the comparing from citation to article views and social media attention. More important, we find that OA papers not only have the great advantage of total downloads, but also have the feature of keeping sustained and steady downloads for a long time. For article downloads, non-OA papers only have a short period of attention, when the advantage of OA papers exists for a much longer time.

Direct to Full Text Article (12 pages; PDF)

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