Author perspectives on research visibility and impact

The poster will present findings from a survey of 375 corresponding authors whose publications have been published open access as part of the Springer Compact agreement between Bibsam and Springer Nature 2016-

2018. In focus is how these authors reason about ways to make their research visible, how/if they themselves try to track the attention gained by the publication, and what they think are good impact measures. The study thus

adds to previous work on author attitudes and practices (e.g. Hammarfelt & Haddow, 2018; Tenopir et al., 2016) and can provide some input into the current work in Sweden on how to evaluate and assure high research quality

(UKÄ, 2018).

When asked about their arguments for publishing open access, a large proportion of respondents in freetext answers indicated that open access is important because it increases a publication’s visibility, access to it, downloads and/or social and scientific impact. Consequently, it is interesting to investigate if open access

publishing is the only way in which these authors try to find readers for their publication, or if they take further steps. Answers suggest researchers use general social media, academic networking sites, and more traditional digital channels to share their publications.

Furthermore, the study asked which measures the authors think are the best ones for assessing the impact of their publications, and how they themselves find out how much attention their publications get. The responses

will be discussed in terms of traditional metrics, such as JIFs and citations, and altmetrics, such as how documents are accessed or appraised (Haustein et al., 2016) through downloads or shares in social media. They will also be

related to more indirect forms of research evaluation, such as peer review and social impact.