Open Access

1. Dr. Fintan Bracken
Librarian, Research Services & Bibliometrics
University of Limerick
Institutional Repositories and
Altmetrics for the AHSS
Publication and Dissemination in the Arts, Humanities and Social
Sciences – Limerick Institute of Technology
10th March 2017

2. Presentation Outline
• Open Access
• Institutional Repositories
• Altmetrics

3. What is Open Access?
• Open Access (OA)  the practice of granting free Web
access to research articles and other products of
research including theses and book chapters.
• Two main types of open access:
 Gold open access  immediate open access that is
provided by a publisher either in a fully OA journal or
a hybrid journal.
 Green open access  immediate or delayed open
access that is provided through self-archiving.

4. Benefits of Open Access
• No subscriptions necessary
• Greater visibility of your research – indexed by Google Scholar,
Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
• Dissemination of knowledge – a public good
• Satisfy funding agency requirements (e.g. SFI, IRC, EU – see
http://libguides.ucd.ie/data/funders for more details)
 Peer-reviewed publications from projects funded by Horizon
2020 must be made OA within 6 months or 12 months for social
sciences & humanities research
• Increases research exposure and citation rate (Open Access citation
advantage)

5. The Open Access Citation Advantage
Total number of studies up to 2015 70
Studies that found a citation advantage
46
(66%)
Studies that found no citation advantage 17
Studies that were inconclusive, found
non-significant data or measured other
things than citation advantage for articles
7
Source: http://sparceurope.org/oaca/

6. Gold OA
• If you are going to publish via Gold OA then you
must pay Author Processing Charges (APCs)
• APCs range from US$350 to US$5,000 (approx.)
depending on the journal
• Most publishers allow articles to be made OA in
many of their subscription journals i.e. hybrid
journals

7. Examples of Gold OA
• PLoS
• Elsevier

8. Examples of Green OA:
UL Institutional Repository (ULIR) https://ulir.ul.ie/

9. Mary Immaculate Research Repository (MIRR)
http://dspace.mic.ul.ie/

10. edepositIreland http://edepositireland.ie/
A general self-deposit open access repository for publications from Irish
institutions & individuals that don’t have access to an institutional repository.

11. Green OA & Copyright
• Many publishers allow authors to deposit some
form of their work in an open access repository
– e.g. post-print or pre-print
• Use SHERPA RoMEO to check journals’ policies
(http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/)
• Engage with publishers – negotiate contracts &
copyright transfer agreement

12. SHERPA RoMEO

13. Additional Benefits of Institutional Repositories
• Provides an online searchable database of the
research outputs of your project / department
• Increases brand awareness
• Allows theses, working papers, other grey literature
& multimedia formats to be published
• Provides a permanent web link for each publication
• Some provide usage statistics

14. Thesis uploaded to ULIR 17th Dec 2015
Statistics as on 11th Jan 2016

15. Post-print of an Article
• The post-print is the author’s final peer reviewed
draft
• All corrections & suggestions from peer-
reviewers have been incorporated into the draft
• The post-print hasn’t been formatted by the
publisher & doesn’t include the publisher’s logo
• The post-print is normally still a Word document

16. Example of a Post-print
http://hdl.handle.net/10395/1174

18. Google Scholar Researcher Profile

19. Altmetrics
• Altmetrics are measures that capture the attention a resource
generates on the social web or other sources.
• They can be applied to journal articles, books / book chapters,
software, datasets, websites, videos & other research outputs.
• Altmetrics attempt to show influence and engagement of work
through blogs, reference management systems, scholarly social
networks, & other platforms.
• Altmetrics aim is to provide a more comprehensive picture of
scholarly activity & of the use & impact of a researcher's work.

20. Each day, scholarly
articles receive
~44,000 new
mentions across social
media, news, and
blogs.
That’s 1 mention
every 2 seconds!
Each week, ~50k
unique articles are
shared.
Mentions range in
complexity, from
quick shares to
comprehensive reviews.
Altmetrics or article-level
metrics are worth paying
attention to.
Altmetric data, March 2015

21. Potential of Altmetrics in:
• Providing real-time indicators of impact
• Capturing ‘practitioner’ impact of those who may
never publish
• Showing evidence of public engagement
• Being an indicator for future citations?

22. News outlets
• Over 2,000 sites
• Manually curated list
• Text mining
• Global coverage
• Irish Daily Star
• Irish Examiner
• Irish Independent
• Irish Times
• TheJournal.ie
Social media
and blogs
• Twitter, Facebook,
Google+, Sina Weibo
• Public posts only
• Manually curated list
Reference
managers
• Mendeley, CiteULike
• Reader counts
• Don’t count towards the
Altmetric score
Other sources
• Wikipedia
• YouTube
• Reddit
• F1000
• Pinterest
• Q&A
Post-publication
peer review
• Publons
• PubPeer
Policy documents
• NICE Evidence
• Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change
• European Food Safety
Authority
• WHO
• Many more
Altmetric.com tracks the
following sources:

23. Altmetric.com bookmarklet
- works for any paper with a DOI http://altmetric.it

24. Altmetric Explorer for Institutions
(UL - subscription database)
www.altmetricexplorer.com

26. Impactstory (http://impactstory.org/)
tracks impact from across the Web.
Create a profile with your ORCID
credentials in a minute.
https://impactstory.org/u/0000-0002-1228-5109

27. Other Places to Find Altmetrics
• Scopus
• Individual journals & publishers
• Plum Analytics
(http://www.plumanalytics.com/)
• EBSCO databases

28. Plum Analytics
on EBSCOhost
databases

29. What you can do?
• Communicate & promote your research online: Twitter,
blogs, etc
• When talking online about your new publication include
the doi (digital object identifier) instead of the normal
publisher’s URL to ensure it is picked up by altmetrics
• A doi looks something like this: 10.1038/nature13684
• Add http://dx.doi.org/ in front of the doi to convert it
to a clickable URL e.g. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature1368

30. Summary
• Institutional repositories allow you to self-
archive your research publications & make them
Open Access
• The main benefits to you are increased visibility,
impact and citations for your research outputs
• Altmetrics are new measures that take into
account online reader behaviour, network
interactions with content, and social media

31. Thank you for listening
Questions?
Dr. Fintan Bracken
Research Services &
Bibliometrics Librarian,
Glucksman Library,
University of Limerick
Email: fintan.bracken@ul.ie
For more information on topics discussed in this
presentation see http://libguides.ul.ie/research.