Ideas that seem obvious today, at one point were obscure facts known only to a select few. The health benefits of washing hands, wearing a seatbelt while in a car - none of these ideas and practices were accepted immediately. In addition to needing time to incubate, new ideas also need to be accessible so that they can be tested, debated, and built upon. This presentation, which is based on my previous research and personal experiences, will highlight the importance and connection between open access publishing and the role of social media in promotion and dissemination of scholarly research.

1. The Role of Open
Access & Social
Media in Knowledge
Mobilization and
Discovery
Anatoliy Gruzd, PhD
Canada Research Chair & Associate Professor
Director of Research, Social Media Lab
Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada
Gruzd@Ryerson.ca | Twitter: @Gruzd

2. Obvious &
Widely Accepted
… Now
But none of these
ideas and practices
were accepted
immediately.

3. Most new ideas need
time to incubate.
They also need to be
accessible so that they
can be tested, debated,
and built upon.

4. Your paper is finally published!
Now what?
https://www.pinterest.ca/imgur/

5. Disseminate your results
by making them as widely
available as possible
“Information does not put itself into practice.”
- @Phmai (Co-dir of Ryerson Social Media Lab)
1. Make your paper open access
2. Connect with peers & share your
paper on social media

6. Disseminate your results
by making them as widely
available as possible
Models Trends Impact Repositories
1. Make your paper open access
2. Connect with peers & share your
paper on social media

7. Open
Access (OA)
models
• Gold = all published articles are freely
accessible online
• Green = author’s pre-print copy is available
either via an institutional repository and/or
personal website
• Diamond = usually funded via subsidy
models
• Hybrid = authors pay for their paper to be
open access
• Delayed = articles become OA after a
certain period of time
Models Trends Impact Repos

8. Open
Access (OA)
models
• Bronze = a combination of …
o Delayed OA
o Open editorials
o “One-off” articles/issues made open
by the journal
o “Hidden Gold” journals, not indexed
by the Directory of Open Access
Journals (DOAJ)
Models Trends Impact Repos

9. • BD&S is an open access, double
blind peer-reviewed scholarly
journal that publishes
interdisciplinary research about the
implications of big data for societies.
• Article Processing Charge (APC) is
waived for articles published in the
special issues.
• Authors who do not have funding for
open access publishing can request
a waiver from the publisher, SAGE.
• The accepted version of the article
may be posted in the author's
institutional repository.
(Piwowar et al, 2018)
The journal's Impact Factor of 4.577 ranks it as the 2nd highest journal
(out of 108) in the Social Sciences Interdisciplinary domain of the SSCI.
*SSCI = Social Sciences Citation Index
Hybrid OA Model Example:
Big Data & Society (BD&S) Journal
Models Trends Impact Repos

10. Growing Prevalence
of OA
• At least 28% of the scholarly literature is OA
• OA growth is largely driven by Gold & Hybrid
publications
• Most common mechanism for OA is “bronze” -
“free-to-read” articles on the publisher website
(without an explicit OA license)
OA, 28%
non-OA,
72%
(Piwowar et al, 2018)
Models Trends Impact Repos

11. OA
International
Trends
(Hook, Calvert & Hahnel, 2019)

12. Scholarly Impact of
OA vs non-OA
• Overall, OA articles receive 18% more
citations than average, when accounting
for age and discipline (Piwowar et al, 2018)
• Medicine: “although non-OA journals still
have higher output in terms of articles per
year, OA journals have higher citation
metrics.” (AlRyalat, et.al., 2019)
• Civil Engineering: “On average OA
articles received 43 citations while Non-OA
articles were cited 29 times” (Koler-Povh,
Južnič, Turk, 2014)
Models Trends Impact Repos

13. More funding agencies
are now requiring OA
• Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on
Publications
• Grant recipients archive the final peer-
reviewed full-text manuscript in an online
repository where it will be freely
accessible within 12 months (e.g.,
institutional repository or discipline-based
repository).
• Grant recipients can publish in a journal
that offers open access or that offers
open access on its website within 12
months.
• http://www.science.gc.ca/eic/site/063.nsf/
eng/h_F6765465.html?OpenDocument
https://roarmap.eprints.org/
Registry of Open Access Repositories
Mandatory Archiving Policies (ROARMAP)
Models Trends Impact Repos

14. Steps to make your research widely available
Share your article via Ryerson
Institutional Repository
If you are not sure, check the
publisher’s open access
policies via Sherpa Romeo
Share your data via Scholars
Portal Dataverse or other
data repositories
https://digital.library.ryerson.ca https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ https://dataverse.scholarsportal.info/
Models Trends Impact Repos

15. WIP papers and papers under review:
To share or not to share?
Pre-print repository
for “hard” sciences
Pre-print repository for
social sciences
Other pre-print
repositories
https://arxiv.org/ https://advance.sagepub.com/ https://www.ssrn.com/
Models Trends Impact Repos

16. Disseminate your results
by making them as widely
available as possible
1. Make your paper open access
2. Connect with peers & share your
paper on social media
Scholarly
Communication
Social Media for
Academics Benefits Altmetrics

17. Evolution of scholarly
communication
Letters
Emails
Mailing lists
Social Media
Scholarly
Comm.
Social
Media Benefits Altmetrics

18. Scholarly communication:
Then & Now
Letters of Edwin Gilpin, a Canadian mining
engineer, government official & author (1850-
1907)
Tweets of a contemporary scientist in the domain of
Earth Sciences (2014)
(MacDonald, Gruzd, Collins, 2020)
9 months | 1300 letters | people=616 | ties=1277 1 month | 1302 tweets | people=756 | ties=1578
Scholarly
Comm.
Social
Media Benefits Altmetrics

19. Popular social media platforms
among academics
Frequent
Use
Non-academic
soc.networks
Blogs
Online
document
management
Media
repositories
Wikis
Occasional
Use
Presentation
sharing sites
Video/tele
conference
Blog Wikis
Academic
soc.networks
(Gruzd & Goertzen, 2013)
Scholarly
Comm.
Social
Media Benefits Altmetrics

20. Coverage of academic
publications on social media
Twitter
68%
Facebook
17%
Blogs
7%
News
6%
Google+
2%
* Based on ~1M articles
published between 2011-2015
(indexed by Scopus) and that
have at least one citation &
one social media mention
(captured up until Feb 2017)(Hassan et al., 2017)
Scholarly
Comm.
Social
Media Benefits Altmetrics

21. Benefits of using social media
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60%
Discovering new funding
Garnering mass media attention
Publishing findings
Maintaining professional image
Soliciting advice from peers
Collaborating with other researchers
Making new research contacts
Promoting current work/research
Discovering new ideas or publications
Following other researchers' work
Keeping up to date with topics
Scholarly
Comm.
Social
Media Benefits Altmetrics
(Gruzd & Goertzen, 2013)

22. Related benefits of social media
use based on the factor analysis
Social & Info
Dissemination
Information
Gathering
Collaboration explains 24%
of the total variance
explains 16%
of the total variance
Scholarly
Comm.
Social
Media Benefits Altmetrics

23. As more people talk about
research online, social ‘signals’
are becoming more valuable for …
• Academics – discover what peers are discussing
• Institutions & Funders – assess research impact
• Publishers – ↑readership, feature most-discussed research,
discover popular topics for future calls
• Appointment, Tenure & Promotion Committees – evaluate
scholarly output / service-component
Scholarly
Comm.
Social
Media Benefits Altmetrics

24. But how do you know who
shares and discusses your
research on social media?
• Hint: Not just academics! Also …
• institutions
• journalists
• librarians
• policy makers
• communities of practice
• others

25. But how do you know who
shares and discusses your
research on social media?
• Hint: Not just academics! Also …
• institutions
• journalists
• librarians
• policy makers
• communities of practice
• others
• Altmetrics can help us find this out

26. Altmetrics is
“The creation and study of
new metrics based on the
Social Web for analyzing
and informing scholarship”
(Adie & Roe, 2013)
Google Trends for Altmetric
Scholarly
Comm.
Social
Media Benefits Altmetrics

27. Altmetrics:
Research Topics
• To what extent articles published in a
journal are discussed on social media
(coverage)?
• Is there a relationship between altmetrics
and more traditional impact factors
(correlation studies)?
• Ex: among altmetrics, blog count is the
strongest predictor of increased citations:
“One more blog post discussing a
publication increases the chance of more
citations by 4.7%” (Hassan et al., 2017)
Scholarly
Comm.
Social
Media Benefits Altmetrics

28. Scholarly
Comm.
Social
Media Benefits Altmetrics
Altmetrics Indicators
• Basic altmetrics
indicators can be
found on the
publisher’s page

29. Scholarly
Comm.
Social
Media Benefits Altmetrics
(Melero, 2015)
Altmetrics
Tools/Companies

30. https://plu.mx/plum/a/?doi=10.1016/j.socnet.2011.05.006
Scholarly
Comm.
Social
Media Benefits Altmetrics

31. https://www.altmetric.com/details/245848
Scholarly
Comm.
Social
Media Benefits Altmetrics

32. https://www.altmetric.com/products/free-tools/bookmarklet/
Access to Altmetric Data
Scholarly
Comm.
Social
Media Benefits Altmetrics

33. Altmetrics Limitations
Scholarly
Comm.
Social
Media Benefits Altmetrics
• Don’t capture interactions from some social media sites popular among academics
https://www.academia.eduhttps://www.researchgate.net

34. Altmetrics Limitations
Scholarly
Comm.
Social
Media Benefits Altmetrics
• Don’t capture interactions from some social media sites popular among academics
(Gruzd et al., 2020)
Content Type n=1,227 posts
Explanation 592 (48%)
Information Seeking 274 (22%)
Providing Resources 260 (21%)
Socializing with Positive Intent 204 (17%)
Explanation with Disagreement 71 (6%)
Subreddit Rules and Norms 66 (5%)
Explanation with Agreement 45 (4%)
Socializing with Negative Intent 4 (0%)

35. Takeaways
• When deciding what social
media platform(s) to use,
don’t limit yourself to what
Altmetrics tools track.
• Go to where your peers and
receptor communities are!
• To gain more exposure and
reach more people, make
your work available via
#OpenAccess.
Practical Guides

36. References
• Adie, E., & Roe, W. (2013). Altmetric: Enriching scholarly content with article-level discussion and metrics. Learned Publishing, 26(1), 11–17.
https://doi.org/10.1087/20130103
• AlRyalat, S. A., Saleh, M., Alaqraa, M., Alfukaha, A., Alkayed, Y., Abaza, M., Abu Saa, H., & Alshamiry, M. (2019). The impact of the open-access status on journal indices:
A review of medical journals. F1000Research, 8. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.17979.1
• Gruzd, A., & Goertzen, M. (2013). Wired Academia: Why Social Science Scholars Are Using Social Media. The 46th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
(HICSS): 3332-3341, DOI: 10.1109/HICSS.2013.614
• Hassan, S.-U., Imran, M., Gillani, U., Aljohani, N. R., Bowman, T. D., & Didegah, F. (2017). Measuring social media activity of scientific literature: An exhaustive
comparison of scopus and novel altmetrics big data. Scientometrics, 113(2), 1037–1057. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2512-x
• Hook, D. W., Calvert, I., & Hahnel, M. (2019). The ascent of open access. An Analysis of the Open Access Landscape since the Turn of the Millennium.
https://digitalscience.figshare.com/articles/The_Ascent_of_Open_Access/7618751
• Koler-Povh, T., Južnič, P., & Turk, G. (2014). Impact of open access on citation of scholarly publications in the field of civil engineering. Scientometrics, 98(2), 1033–
1045. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1101-x
• Gruzd, A., Kumar, P., Abul-Fottouh, D., & Haythornthwaite, C. (2020). Coding and Classifying Knowledge Exchange on Social Media: A Comparative Analysis of the
#Twitterstorians and AskHistorians Communities. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-020-09376-y
• MacDonald, B., Gruzd, A, Collins, V. (2020). Scientific Communication Networks: Tracking Victorian and Twenty-First Century Communication with Social Network
Analysis, SMSociety’20 Conference. Presentation is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B56tb_SHh_k
• Melero, R. (2015). Altmetrics–a complement to conventional metrics. Biochemia medica, 25(2), 152-160.
• Piwowar, H., Priem, J., Larivière, V., Alperin, J. P., Matthias, L., Norlander, B., Farley, A., West, J., & Haustein, S. (2018). The state of OA: A large-scale analysis of the
prevalence and impact of Open Access articles. PeerJ, 6, e4375. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4375
• Salisbury, L., Chowdhury, A. R., & Smith, J. J. (2017). Faculty Publications from a Research University: The Scholarly Impact of Open Access versus Non-Open Access.
Science & Technology Libraries, 36(2), 187–199. https://doi.org/10.1080/0194262X.2016.1273815
• Resources about Open Access Models:
• https://library.carleton.ca/sites/default/files/help/writing-citing/handout-traditionalvsopenaccess.pdf
• http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm
• https://researchguides.library.vanderbilt.edu/c.php?g=144567&p=946137
• https://awayofhappening.wordpress.com/2017/08/18/bronze-and-delayed-open-access-what-can-we-do-about-these