There are lots of good reasons to publish in open access journals. Two of the most commonly given ones are the beliefs that OA articles are read more widely and that they generate higher citations.

Do open access articles also get higher altmetric counts?

We take a look at Nature Communications to see if there is any discernible difference in the quantitative altmetrics between their open access and reader pays articles. We picked Nature Communications to look at as it’s a relatively high volume, multi-disciplinary hybrid journal (at least it was during our study period – it has gone fully OA now) that clearly marks up authors, license and subject areas in its metadata.

The dataset behind this post can be found here:

http://figshare.com/articles/Altmetrics_data_for_Nature_Communications_articles_Oct_13_Oct_14/1213687