Open Access and Altmetrics in the pandemic age: Forescast analysis on COVID-19 literature

  1. Daniel Torres-Salinas
  2. Nicolas Robinson-Garcia
  3. Pedro A. Castillo-Valdivieso

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Abstract

We present an analysis on the uptake of open access on COVID-19 related literature as well as the social media attention they gather when compared with non OA papers. We use a dataset of publications curated by Dimensions and analyze articles and preprints. Our sample includes 11,686 publications of which 67.5% are openly accessible. OA publications tend to receive the largest share of social media attention as measured by the Altmetric Attention Score. 37.6% of OA publications are bronze, which means toll journals are providing free access. MedRxiv contributes to 36.3% of documents in repositories but papers in BiorXiv exhibit on average higher AAS. We predict the growth of COVID-19 literature in the following 30 days estimating ARIMA models for the overall publications set, OA vs. non OA and by location of the document (repository vs. journal). We estimate that COVID-19 publications will double in the next 20 days, but non OA publications will grow at a higher rate than OA publications. We conclude by discussing the implications of such findings on the dissemination and communication of research findings to mitigate the coronavirus outbreak.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.23.057307: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    All the analyses are conducted on an Ubuntu 18.04.1 machine with R version 3.6.3 and RStudio version 1.1.456.
    RStudio
    suggested: (RStudio, RRID:SCR_000432)

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    While the dataset itself is not free of limitations, and other COVID-19 datasets are being used alternatively, it is the one coming from the largest scientific database as compared with Web of Science and Scopus (Torres-Salinas et al., 2020). Furthermore, the search query used seems to be much more restrictive than other used elsewhere, which can introduce some noise when identifying the scientific corpus specifically dealing with this virus (Colavizza et al., 2020). The findings reported here shows that many journals (e.g., New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, JAMA, Nature) are doing an important effort to prioritize the urgency of the current situation over their monetary benefits by providing COVID-19 related literature in OA. This is an unprecedented event which should not go unnoticed, and explains to a large extent the large shares of OA literature identified related with the coronavirus outbreak. The interest on scientific development on this front go beyond the scientific realm as the high social media attention revolving these documents shows. Scientific advancements are reported daily in the news media, discussed on Twitter and used for decision-making by politicians. Indeed, scientific efforts have not only focused on mitigating the pandemic, but have also responded to social concerns, such as those derived from the rise of fake news (Andersen et al., 2020). The amount of literature produced since the coronavirus outbreak suggests an exponential growth on t...

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

  2. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.23.057307: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    All the analyses are conducted on an Ubuntu 18.04.1 machine with R version 3.6.3 and RStudio version 1.1.456.
    RStudio
    suggested: (RStudio, SCR_000432)
    Pubmed is the repository with the largest number of publications, followed by medRxiv.
    Pubmed
    suggested: (PubMed, SCR_004846)
    Documents indexed in BioRxiv receive on average, the highest social media attention. 7.
    BioRxiv
    suggested: (bioRxiv, SCR_003933)

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your data.

    About SciScore

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore is not a substitute for expert review. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers) in the manuscript, and detects sentences that appear to be missing RRIDs. SciScore also checks to make sure that rigor criteria are addressed by authors. It does this by detecting sentences that discuss criteria such as blinding or power analysis. SciScore does not guarantee that the rigor criteria that it detects are appropriate for the particular study. Instead it assists authors, editors, and reviewers by drawing attention to sections of the manuscript that contain or should contain various rigor criteria and key resources. For details on the results shown here, please follow this link.

  3. Version published to 10.1101/2020.04.23.057307v1 on bioRxiv