In undertaking this research, we wanted to learn more about non-academic users of research content, in particular looking at the effect of this work being made available OA, where research related to the SDGs.
Our bibliometric study on SDG-related content shows that Gold OA content has substantially higher online usage and attention than content that is only available under a Subscription model, both on a global basis and for content with at least one Dutch author. This supports previous research and further points to an OA advantage for researchers.
We found Gold OA documents in Hybrid publications are downloaded even more often than OA documents in Fully OA publications and receive more attention. As we noted, there are possible explanations for this, with Hybrid journals being better established and attracting more users. However, there may be a level of selection bias with the possibility that authors choose OA in a Hybrid journal for their most significant work, which therefore attracts higher attention. We used the Journal Impact Factor as a proxy for journal prestige in our model (which certainly has its limitations), but again found a higher advantage for Hybrid OA.
From a Dutch perspective it is certainly worth highlighting the fact that SDG-related documents published with Springer Nature in 2017 have recorded around twice as many downloads on average than the global figure, surely an effect of the Springer Compact agreement for Hybrid OA journals that has been in place between Dutch universities and Springer Nature since 2015. Furthermore, our results show that Dutch SDG-relevant content published under the Gold OA Hybrid model accrue significantly more societal attention as well as academic citations when compared to comparable Subscription documents. Thus it follows that the model is ideally suited for maximising the overall societal impact of SDG-research.
As noted earlier in this report, there are very many studies available that have looked at whether there is an OA citation advantage or not, with mixed results. It is important to note that many of these studies haven’t controlled for confounding factors, were limited to just a few journals or a single discipline, and that many found a correlation but didn’t suggest a causation. Although this study did find an OA citation advantage for SDG-related content when controlled for selected variables at the document, author and journal level, the effects are much smaller when compared to the online usage and attention advantage we observed. Given the particular interest of this study in exploring non-academic usage, this data in particular supports our assumption that OA reaches a substantial number of user groups outside of academia that typically don’t have access to a large amount of Subscription content, and are typically less likely to cite this work.
Overall, these results support our underlying assumption that users outside of the core academic research audience do benefit in particular from OA. With our survey this assumption is put to the test, and we find a substantial number of non-core users who are interested in research content, with more than 40% falling into the Halo or General user segments.
While the Halo group can be described relatively precisely (users who are likely to read – but not publish – research for professional purposes predominantly in a medical or corporate setting), the General audience consists of a very long-tail of different user groups. What they have in common is that they read research out of personal or professional interest, perhaps on a casual basis, but they are not in an occupation where they are likely to conduct and publish research or reference research in a scholarly publication.
Both the Halo and General user segments differ significantly from the Core segment. They typically have access to the full text of fewer journals than their academic counterparts, and therefore more often have difficulties accessing research content. No doubt, both the Halo and General user groups benefit particularly from OA. Future research could consider what the knock-on effect of not being able to access the content might be.
When looking at the reasons and motivations for reading research content, we can see that the Halo segment is more likely to be reading for the purposes of staying up to date. Both the Halo and General segments are more likely to share documents with others, possibly because the act of citing a document takes the place of sharing, to a certain extent, within the Core segment.
Interestingly, within the General segment, usage was much more likely to be for personal reasons, or a mixture of both professional and personal interest. Respondents particularly from the General audience also reported on a long-tail of miscellaneous reasons, which are instructive in their sheer variety. They include using material for teaching and training, investigating personal medical issues, simple curiosity and evaluating a journal for paper submission, amongst many other things.
To conclude, both studies suggest a significant benefit of OA to readers both in and outside of academia. The content is more widely and easily accessible, and as a consequence utilised more frequently in terms of online usage, sharing and attention, and citations. Our results suggest 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 rather “consume” this corpus of literature. By combining these two studies, 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.
