The visibility of open access publications – Results of sub-project 5 of Austrian Transition to Open Access 2 (AT2OA2)

Subproject 5 - Visibility of Open Access Publications of Austrian Transition to Open Access 2 (AT2OA2) was dedicated, among other things, to whether Open Access, in addition to improving the availability of scholarly publications, also contributes to increasing visibility. Alternative metrics (altmetrics) served as the primary hook and vehicle for investigating this and other questions, as they are no longer mainly citation-based metrics that provide information about the reception of scientific achievements. A particular focus of the activities was realizing a study in cooperation with Altmetric (Digital Science). For this purpose, a data set generated as part of the predecessor project AT2OA and covering the publication years 2015-2018 was expanded in several steps with data on publications from 2019-2021, enriched with the help of Altmetric, and then analyzed based on specific research questions. It should be noted in particular that a unique feature of this study is the use of normalized altmetrics data (Relative Index Metric). In addition to the study and its results, the final recommendations for increasing the visibility of scholarly achievements are probably the most important outcome.