Social media as a tool for open access article promotion and engagement

Abstract

OBJECTIVES: Facing journal budget cuts, the J. Otto Lottes Health Sciences librarians are testing out a way to engage faculty in the open access conversation through social media. This poster will discuss how blogging and Twitter are used in the J. Otto Lottes Health Sciences Library to promote faculty who publish open access, and whether this engages those faculty in the open access discussion. METHODS: Looking at the current literature on research and social media, the library discovered an open access online effort encouraging the sharing of open access articles tagged with #OpenAccess, and #OA on Twitter. The library developed a marketing plan to promote University of Missouri health sciences faculty publishing open access. Using Web of Science alerts, recently published open access articles in health sciences related disciplines are emailed to an appointed librarian. The librarian selects an article to promote, and contacts the faculty member, detailing how they will be featured on the MU Libraries Library Matters website, along with questions prompting open access discussion. A blog post is created highlighting the faculty member, and, if possible, the reasons why they chose to publish open access. A corresponding tweet, with the blog post url, is published at the same time as the blog post. We anticipate promoting open access articles will increase faculty engagement with the library, and increase interest in open access publishing in general. The larger goal, beyond the scope of this project, is that this will inform our library subscriptions.