Did you know that open access articles attract more citations than those published in subscription journals?
Between 2004 and 2015 SPARC collected a body of research evidence demonstrating the Open Access Citation Advantage. A study in the open access journal PLoS ONE found that advantage to be as high as 19% — even when articles had been embargoed (made open access after a certain period). This is especially interesting since making things Open Access after an embargo period is so common, especially for making things REF compliant in GALA.
If you think about it, it is quite logical, Open Access makes it easier for simply anyone to access your work – meaning that academics anywhere can cite it without needing an expensive journal subscription, or to pay to access the article themselves.
You can also use Open Access for more – for data, for non-traditional outputs, for whatever you do… Using GALA, it is possible to make a record and share any work you have been doing, not just books and journal articles!
and Open Access is great for sharing!
If you were to click on a link on twitter, and only reach a paywall, a request for money, you aren’t very likely to continue down the path to reading this paper, unless it is extremely relevant to you. If you click on a link and can immediately read the paper, there is no problem!
You can use social media tools like Twitter to share your work and there are even tools to track the activity – you don’t have to take my word for it!
Altmetric – altmetric.com
Social media interactions can be tracked and interrogated using tools like Altmetric, which gives you access to the attention people are giving your work. Altmetric can track anything with a DOI, be it an article, a book or chapter, a report or a dataset. Altmetric is accessible from their website, as well as in GALA.
Click the doughnut in any record to see who has been talking about your work. You can also use the Altmetric bookmarklet to look for Altmetrics on a specific item.
You will soon be able to search a Greenwich instance of the Altmetric database – watch this space!
Kudos – growkudos.com
Kudos is a website that allows you to claim your papers, create additional content such as a lay-summary, and then facilitates your use of social media to promote and share your work. It also tracks who interacts with your posts, who retweets and talks about your work, integrating fully with Altmetric.