Social media visibility of open access versus non-open access articles: A case study of Life Sciences & Biomedicine

Paper in proceeding, 2019

This study aims to determine whether and to what extent OA status of articles predicts their social media visibility when controlling for a considerable number of important factors. These factors which previous research confirmed their positive associations with altmetric counts are journal impact, individual collaboration, research funding, number of MESH topics, international collaboration, lay summary, and F1000 Score. The data for this study comprises 83,479 articles and reviews in the research area of Life Sciences & Biomedicine from 2012-2016, retrieved from the Medlin in November 2018. The results showed that (except for policy documents) the percentage of OA articles mentioned on altmetrics platforms was significantly higher than that of the NOA articles. Furthermore, OA factor is significantly associated with the increasing number of tweets, news posts, Facebook posts and blog posts and decreasing zero counts on each platform. Finally, OA status of articles is likely to increase the number of tweets, Facebooks posts, news posts, and blog posts by 97.6%, 25.2%, 78.2% and 51.4%, respectively.