The Open Access Advantage Considering Citation, Article Usage and Social Media Attention

TL;DR

This study analyzes the impact of open access articles compared to non-open access, demonstrating sustained citation, download, and social media attention advantages for OA articles over time.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence of the long-term impact and social media attention benefits of open access articles using data from Nature Communications.

Findings

OA articles have higher citation counts.

OA articles maintain steady downloads longer.

OA articles attract more social media attention.

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 Jan. 2012 to 31 Aug. 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.