Executive Summary

This white paper summarises findings from a joint project between Springer Nature, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) and the Dutch University Libraries and the National Library consortium (UKB), exploring how research content is being used outside of academia. It draws together findings from a bibliometric analysis of nearly 360,000 documents published in 2017 (book chapters, journal documents and proceedings), and a survey of nearly 6,000 readers on Springer Nature websites, putting a spotlight on the potential impact of immediate Gold OA publishing on societal impact: who uses research content where this relates to the SDGs, and for what purpose? Our results show a strong OA advantage, with a high volume of readers from non-academic communities.

Key findings:

There is a notable OA advantage for usage and attention of SDG content

Reinforcing previous studies, this analysis found OA documents receive substantially more online usage compared to Subscription content using both averages and regression models (Table 1).

For the 36,800 Springer Nature SDG-related documents analysed, there were on average 4.4 times as many downloads for documents published immediately Gold OA under a Hybrid OA model and 2.7 times as many downloads on average for documents published in Fully OA publications.

There is a notable OA advantage for usage and attention of SDG content.

OA content is shared more often and gets more attention than Subscription content.

For 358,000 SDG-related documents in the Dimensions database published in 2017, Gold Hybrid OA publications have 2.1 times higher average Altmetric Attention Scores than Subscription content, and Fully Gold OA publications have 1.7 times higher scores.

Our model predicts 2.0 times higher scores for Hybrid OA and 1.5 times higher for Fully OA

There is a less clear advantage found in the data for citations.

While the average number of citations is somewhat lower for Gold OA content, the regression model predicts a small positive impact for Fully OA publications, and a 1.5 times higher number for Gold Hybrid documents. Since citations are mainly an indicator for academic content utilisation, these observations may support the assumption that one of the main advantages of OA is that it reaches a substantial number of user groups outside of academia that typically don’t have access to a large amount of Subscription content, as witnessed by the substantial online usage and attention advantage.

A similar effect is found for a country-level analysis looking at the Netherlands, with higher downloads and attention.There is notable variation between Hybrid OA and Fully OA

These differences may reflect a number of factors, including the fact that Hybrid journals are more established. Although we controlled for journal prestige in our model, there may be limitations with this approach.

OA is reaching a substantial number of user groups outside of academia

Approximately 40% of readers surveyed for this analysis on Springer Nature websites were classified as non-academic audiences, including 15% “Halo” users (likely to be reading research for professional purposes but not conducting or publishing research themselves) and 28% “General” users (likely to be reading out of personal or professional interest but outside of a role where conducting, publishing or citing research is typical).

OA significantly benefits non-academic audiences

Only half of all surveyed users said they were able to access the full text of Subscription content. Access was notably more difficult for Halo and General users, with 62% of total respondents reporting that they often (“almost always” or “frequently”) have difficulties accessing full text content.

A large number of respondents in the General user group reported giving up if they cannot access a document.

A high number of non-academic audiences intend to share findings with others

Where core academic audiences are most likely to cite or reference the content they read, the Halo and General segments are more likely to share documents with others. This is significantly easier where the content is OA.

Conclusions

Our results show a substantial benefit from OA to users who are outside of academia, and that the biggest beneficiaries of immediate Gold OA may not be the core academic researcher community who “contribute” to research, but the many communities that “consume” this corpus of literature. The significantly higher usage and attention for OA content supports previous evidence on the benefits of publishing OA, and our survey takes this further, showing how wide the non-academic audience for OA content is. By combining these results, we can begin to see a substantial amplification effect in how research is being used, shared, and built up to increase knowledge and affect real world change outside academia. In doing so, this report makes a strong case for the further investment and funding for OA for the benefit of society, particularly in supporting research related to the SDGs.