Purpose This study aimed to examine how educational researchers in Spain promoted the dissemination of scientific knowledge on Twitter/X as a platform and to contrast their approach with science influencers in the same country.
Methods Accounts on the Twitter/X service belonging to 210 Spanish researchers were analyzed, and their 2016–2020 tweets were compared to those of 38 Twitter/X influencers. Text mining techniques, sentiment and emotion analysis, network analysis, and the Kardashian index (K-index) were used in the study.
Results The results indicated a low academic presence of researchers (4.4%) on Twitter/X. The researchers shared 185,020 posts (38.7% original content and 61.3% retweets). A network analysis revealed low interconnectivity among researchers, with distinct clusters based on their interests or affiliations. The top influencers had strong connections with the news media. The researchers focused minimally on academic topics, while the influencers emphasized the dissemination of scientific findings. The impact of the researchers’ posts was minimal, with low K-index values, whereas the influencers had greater reach because of their follower base.
Conclusion When using Twitter/X, the researchers had a minimal impact on the dissemination of scientific information because they published few original posts and relied instead on retweets unrelated to their academic or research activities. Consequently, the researchers did not use Twitter/X as a tool for scientific communication, which limited the potential for forming new connections beyond their existing social and academic networks. Promoting informal learning that encompasses diverse knowledge and learning levels is crucial to fostering greater engagement and collaboration.
Purpose The ultimate goal of current open access (OA) initiatives is for library services to use OA resources. This study aimed to assess the infrastructure for OA scholarly information services by tabulating the number and proportion of OA articles in a literature database.
Methods We measured the absolute numbers and proportions of OA articles at different time points across various disciplines based on the Web of Science (WoS) database.
Results The number (proportion) of available OA articles between 2000 and 2021 in the WoS database was 12 million (32.4%). The number (proportion) of indexed OA articles in 1 year was 0.15 million (14.6%) in 2000 and 1.5 million (48.0%) in 2021. The proportion of OA by subject categories in the cumulative data was the highest in the multidisciplinary category (2000–2021, 79%; 2021, 89%), high in natural sciences (2000–2021, 21%–46%; 2021, 41%–62%) and health and medicine (2000–2021, 37%–40%; 2021, 52%–60%), and low in social sciences and others (2000–2021, 23%–32%; 2021, 36%–44%), engineering (2000–2021, 17%–33%; 2021, 31%–39%) and humanities and arts (2000–2021, 11%–22%; 2021, 28%–38%).
Conclusion Our study confirmed that increasingly many OA research papers have been published in the last 20 years, and the recent data show considerable promise for better services in the future. The proportions of OA articles differed among scholarly disciplines, and designing library services necessitates several considerations with regard to the customers’ demands, available OA resources, and strategic approaches to encourage the use of scholarly OA articles.
This article presents the growth and development of preprints to help authors, editors, and publishers understand and adopt appropriate strategies for incorporating preprints within their scholarly communication strategies. The article considers: preprint history and evolution, integration of preprints and journals, and the benefits and disadvantages, and challenges that preprints offer. The article discusses the two largest and most established preprint servers, arXiv.org (established in 1991) and SSRN (1994), the OSF (Open Science Foundation) initiative that supported preprint growth (2010), bioRxiv (2013), and medRxiv (2019). It then discusses six different levels of acceptance of preprints within journals: uneasy relationship, acceptance of preprint articles, encouraging authors to preprint their articles, active participation with preprints, submerger by reviewing preprints, and finally merger and overlay models. It is notable that most journals now accept submissions that have been posted as preprints. The benefits of preprints include fast circulation, priority publication, increased visibility, community feedback, and contribution to open science. Disadvantages include information overload, inadequate quality assurance, citation dilution, information manipulation and inflation of results. As preprints become mainstream it is likely that they will benefit authors but disadvantage publishers and journals. Authors are encouraged to preprint their own articles but to be cautious about using preprints as the basis for their own research. Editors are encouraged to develop preprint policies and be aware that double-blind review is not possible with preprinting of articles and that allowing citations to preprints is to be encouraged. In conclusion, journal-related stakeholders should consider preprints as an unavoidable development, taking into consideration both the benefits and disadvantages.
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