Education and PublishingAn examination of the effect of open versus paywalled access publication on the disseminative impact and citation count of publications in intensive care medicine and anesthesia
Introduction
There are approximately 28,100 active science and medical peer-review journals (in English), publishing approximately 2.5 million articles per year. The volume scientific publishing is accelerating annually [1]. Historically, medical journals have been available in paper format only and subject to subscription fees. This model has now evolved to become more nuanced, where most major journals now use a hybrid approach that sees some articles published as open access (OA) and others behind a paywall (i.e. paywalled access – PA) for a prescribed amount of time. Recently there has been a significant increase in the number of OA medical journals. There are approximately 28,100 active peer-review journals, 7245 (25.8%) of which, are fully OA [1]. This number is increasing annually [2]. OA, in theory, promotes free sharing of scientific publication and the potential for wider circulation of a publication.
The specialties of intensive care medicine (ICM) and emergency medicine have moved towards ‘free open access medical education’, or FOAMEd [3]. The aim is to promote free medical information across a number of online media. FOAMEd resources are frequently shared with the use of Twitter and the hashtag ‘#FOAMed’. In addition, the number of registered users of scientific social networks including academia.edu, ResearchGate and Mendeley has rapidly grown [1]. This could indicate a change in attitude and increased willingness for scientists to adapt modern social media platforms.
Traditionally, the impact of a publication has been measured using citation count and, for a journal, impact factor. Citation counts and impact factor [4,5] have both been subject to scrutiny. New, ‘alternative’ metrics have evolved and have sought to account for the increase in sharing of medical research over social media platforms. One such example is the Altmetric Attention Score (AAS – Altmetric.com) which measures the impact of an individual article's online dissemination [6]. It is calculated with a score based on weighted, composite quantitative measure of online attention based on volume, authors and sources [7]. The AAS uses an algorithm based on multiple media outlets which are weighted depending on the relative reach of each source [8]. A high AAS suggests greater dissemination. However, the AAS is sensitive to many modes of free social media (such as Twitter and Facebook) and thus, there is potential for manipulation by authors and publishers to falsely inflate their AAS. It is therefore difficult to determine if a high AAS is due to the significance and quality of an article or due to whimsical sharing of articles across social media.
To our knowledge, there has been no study thus far examining whether OA or PA publication influences dissemination metrics as measured by Altmetric scores in ICM and anesthesia.
Section snippets
Materials and methods
The primary aim of this study was to determine whether the access status (OA vs PA) of an article had any influence on the online dissemination of publications as measured by the AAS. We hypothesised that the rapid adaptation of the ICM community to free sharing of information via social media would lead to a high proportion of OA publications and subsequently higher Altmetric scores for OA versus PA publications. As a comparison, the closely related field of anesthesia was also studied. A
Results
4799 publications in ICM were identified, of which 1854 were included. 2935 publications in anesthesia were identified of which, 1527 were included. All articles from ICM and anesthesia specific journals and articles from other medical journals with relevant clinical application were included. The broad search terms resulted in many articles from unrelated disciplines (e.g. veterinary medicine, psychology, epidemiology), nursing journals, dietetics and laboratory sciences appearing in the
Discussion
This study demonstrates that a higher proportion of ICM articles are available as OA when compared to anesthesia (38.9% vs 35.0%, p = 0.02). It also demonstrates that ICM manuscript dissemination appears to be higher in papers published as oA when compared to PA as measured by AAS. This phenomenon was not observed in anesthesia. All ICM articles, regardless of access status, had higher AAS compared to anesthesia. If taken at face value, this appears to satisfy our overall aim of determining
Conclusion
ICM publications that are available as OA in the medium term result in higher AAS when compared to PA publications, this phenomenon was not observed in anesthesia. AAS correlate with future citation counts, however, a larger study is required to confirm this.
Ethics approval and consent to participate
Not applicable.
Declarations of interest
None.
Author's contributions
C.S.B.: Conception, data collection, preparation of manuscript.
D.L: Data collection.
C.B.: Statistical analysis.
B.D.O'D: Preparation of manuscript.
Funding
This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Acknowledgements
None.
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