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

Abstract

We present an analysis on the uptake of open access on COVID-819 related literature as well as the social media attention they gather when9compared with non OA papers. We use a dataset of publications curated by10Dimensions and analyze articles and preprints. Our sample includes 11,68611publications of which 67.5% are openly accessible. OA publications tend to re-12ceive the largest share of social media attention as measured by the Altmetric13Attention Score. 37.6% of OA publications are bronze, which means toll jour-14nals are providing free access. MedRxiv contributes to 36.3% of documents in15repositories but papers in BiorXiv exhibit on average higher AAS. We predict16the growth of COVID-19 literature in the following 30 days estimating ARIMA17models for the overall publications set, OA vs. non OA and by location of the18document (repository vs. journal). We estimate that COVID-19 publications19will double in the next 20 days, but non OA publications will grow at a higher20rate than OA publications. We conclude by discussing the implications of such21findings on the dissemination and communication of research findings to mit-22igate the coronavirus outbreak