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

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 receive the largest share of social media attention as measured by the Altmetric13Attention Score. 37.6% of OA publications are bronze, which means toll journals are providing free access. MedRxiv contributes to 36.3% of documents inrepositories 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