The poster will present findings from a survey of 375 corresponding authors whose publications have beenpublished 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 tryto track the attention gained by the publication, and what they think are good impact measures. The study thusadds 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 freetextanswers 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 accesspublishing is the only way in which these authors try to find readers for their publication, or if they take furthersteps. Answers suggest researchers use general social media, academic networking sites, and more traditionaldigital channels to share their publications.

Furthermore, the study asked which measures the authors think are the best ones for assessing the impactof their publications, and how they themselves find out how much attention their publications get. The responseswill be discussed in terms of traditional metrics, such as JIFs and citations, and altmetrics, such as how documentsare accessed or appraised (Haustein et al., 2016) through downloads or shares in social media. They will also berelated to more indirect forms of research evaluation, such as peer review and social impact.

References

Hammarfelt, B. & Haddow, G. (2018). Conflicting measures and values: How humanities scholars in Australia and Swedenuse and react to bibliometric indicators. JASIS&T, 69(7), 924-935.

Haustein, S., Bowman, T. D. & Costas, R. (2016). Interpreting ‘altmetrics’: Viewing acts on social media through the lensof citation and social theories. In Sugimoto, C. R. (Ed.), Theories of informetrics and scholarly communication (pp. 372-405). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

Tenopir, C. et al. (2016). No scholar is an island: The impact of sharing in the work life of scholars. Learned Publishing, 30,5-17.

UKÄ - Universitetskanslerämbetet (2018). Kvalitetssäkring av forskning: Rapportering av ett regeringsuppdrag. (Report2018:2) Stockholm: Universitetskanslerämbetet.