This document summarizes preliminary results from an analysis of how almost 4 million altmetric events are distributed between articles published in open access journals and articles published in other paid journals. The results show that open access articles receive more Twitter mentions and Facebook shares on average, while paid articles receive more Mendeley reads and Wikipedia citations on average. The findings suggest that altmetrics from Twitter and Facebook may better reflect attention from a wider public, while Mendeley is more focused on researchers, and Wikipedia citations come more from researchers with paid access.

1. Kim Holmberg*,1, Fereshteh Didegah1, Timothy D. Bowman1,
Sarah Bowman1, and Terttu Kortelainen2
1 Research Unit for the Sociology of Education, University of Turku
2 Information Studies, University of Oulu
kim.j.holmberg@utu.fi
* Financed by The Finnish Ministry
of Education and Culture’s Open
Science and Research Initiative
*

2. Open science is
“the idea that scientific
knowledge of all kinds
should be openly shared
as early as is practical in
the discovery process.”
Nielsen, M. (2011). Definitions of Open Science? Okfn mailing list. https://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-
science/2011-July/000907.html. Retrieved on 13 January, 2015.

3. Altmetrics and
open science?

4. Friesike and Schildhauer
(2015) suggest that wider
range of quantitative
indicators of a wider range of
impact can be incentivizing for
researchers to make their
research more accessible,
adopting the open science
ideology.
Friesike, S. & Schildhauer, T. (2015). Open science: many good resolutions, very few incentives, yet. In:
Welpe, I.M., Wollersheim, J., Ringelhan, S. & Osterloh, M. (Eds.). Incentives and Performance. Givernance of
Research Organizations. Springer.

5. Created by
researchers
Created by
the public
Altmetrics

6. Altmetrics
Provide a more nuanced
image of the total impact
that research has made?

7. How are altmetric events
distributed between articles
in open access journals and
other journals?

8. Our preliminary results are
based on an analysis of how
almost 4 million altmetric events
are spread between articles in
open access journals (as listed by
DOAJ) and other journals.
Thank you Euan and Altmetric.com for sharing the data!

9. -2.7490
0.0832
-0.0088
0.0014
0.0087
0.0135
0.1986
0.0245
0.0008-0.0008
-0.0218
0.0015
0.0001
1.1447
0.0184
-0.1112
-0.0048
Mendeley readers
Citeulike readers
Connotea readers
Blog posts
News posts
Reddit posts
Facebook posts
Google plus posts
Pinterest postsQ and A posts
F1000 posts
Video posts
LinkedIn posts
Twitter posts
Peer review posts
Wikipedia posts
Policy posts
Figure 1. Differences between the average number of altmetric events for open access
articles and for paid articles. Higher positive values indicate an advantage for open access
articles; higher negative values indicate an advantage for paid articles.

10. The results
• Twitter (and Facebook to lesser degree)
might be able to reflect the attention of a
wider public.
• Mendeley is used mainly by researchers.
• A great deal of Wikipedia articles are
written by researchers with paid access to
research articles (additional evidence of
the high quality of Wikipedia articles?).

12. Kim Holmberg
kim.j.holmberg@utu.fi
http://kimholmberg.fi
@kholmber
Bedankt voor uw
aandacht!
Holmberg, Kim (2015): Open Science logo. figshare. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1391887