Measuring the societal impact of open science

Talk given at 2AM conference 2015. Our preliminary results on the connection between altmetrics and open access publications show a significant difference between altmetric indicators based on number of mentions of open access publications in their content. Open access articles receive more attention on Facebook and (especially) on Twitter compared to articles that are behind paywalls. The opposite appears to be the case for Mendeley readers and (to some extent) for Wikipedia posts, as open access articles are not used as much as those that are behind paywalls in these contexts. The preliminary results are based on an analysis of how almost 4 million altmetric events are spread between articles in open access journals (as listed by DOAJ) and other journals.