All the research that’s fit to print: Open access and the news media

Abstract

The goal of the open access (OA) movement is to help everyone access scholarly research, not just those who can afford to. However, most studies looking at whether OA has met this goal have focused on whether other scholars are making use of OA research. Few have considered how the broader public, including the news media, uses OA research. I sought to answer whether the news media mentions OA articles more or less than paywalled articles by looking at articles published from 2010 through 2018 in journals across all four quartiles of the Journal Impact Factor using data obtained through Altmetric.com and Web of Science. Gold, green and hybrid OA articles all had a positive correlation with the number of news mentions received. News mentions for OA articles did see a dip in 2018, although they remained higher than those for paywalled articles.