Dr Melissa Terras
In October 2011 Dr Terras decided to blog about each of her refereed papers.
Dr Melissa Terras
These were all available in her institution’s open access repository. She noticed that one of papers, written in 2009, had already been downloaded twice from the repository. Very soon after blogging and tweeting about her paper the number of downloads went up to 140. A few weeks later it had been downloaded 535 times. By April 2012 it had been downloaded more than 1000 times.
To test whether this was simply an exceptional paper she then submitted four more papers to her institution’s repository but only tweeted and blogged about three of them.
The papers that were tweeted and blogged had at least more than 11 times the number of downloads than their sibling paper which was left to its own devices in the institutional repository. QED, my friends. QED.Dr Melissa Terras
Read more about this at the LSE Impact Blog.
Dr Bertalan Mesko
Dr Mesko was an experienced blogger but new to academic research. When he
Dr Bertalan Mesko
published his first paper he used his experience as a blogger to share it more widely.
He published the paper (Peripheral blood gene expression patterns discriminate among chronic inflammatory diseases and healthy controls and identify novel targets) in BioMed Central’s open access journal Medical Genomics and shared it via his own English language blog, Scienceroll.com, his Hungarian blog, MediQ.blog.Hu, Twitter, Friendfeed, and ResearchGATE.
The article became one of the most viewed on BioMed Central, earning the “highly accessed” badge, and produced responses from his peers across a range of platforms.
“As a blogger, I expected to get seriously useful and scientifically accurate feedback. My situation is quite special due to the fact that I have been blogging quite actively for years which means getting feedback online and being able to ask scientific questions (through crowdsourcing) were not surprising. What was surprising though is that scientists who work in the same field as us found us now easily and we managed to launch new collaborations based on this (we plan to share the data with a group in the US and combine our efforts for a new study). From this perspective, publishing in an open access journal can provide enormous opportunities if the communication methods of social media are also used by the authors properly and with strategy.”Dr Bertalan Mesko
Find out more about this story at Open Access Success Stories.