Does open source track the effects of open access in the society?

Abstract

The Open Access (OA) is a means by which all users are accessible to the peer-reviewed scholarly articles. This has been established since early 1990’s and has become a major source of journals and articles in this century. As it is a successful method that increases impact, it goes without saying that wide and different target groups are accessible to it which is a very positive outcome. But, it is also a challenge to quantify such vast and different types of usage or impact. This study attempts to extract the efficiency of Open source in quantifying the level of impact created by the OA. This was accomplished by 2 objectives namely: by investigating the effects of NPG’s new initiative towards Open Access to provide read only access to research articles on Open Source Altmetric providers. And to identify the non-academic intellectual impact created by OA journal articles in the society beyond academia using altmetrics, the open metrics. The study showed that the NPG’s new initiative called the beggar link had no significant effect on the impact of Open Access and that the Open source does quantify the impact of OA journals. The evaluation of the data present on OA when analysed showed that the OA had higher impact on most of the altmetric platforms when compared to Non-OA articles.