Open Access Scientific Outputs Published by Iranian Researchers: Scientometrics and Altmetrics Study

The current research was conducted to investigate open-access articles written by Iranian researchers. This study examines the amount of scientific impact (citation indices) and social impact (altmetrics indices) of Iranian open-access scientific outputs. The results of this research can provide information about the effectiveness of open-access scientific publications to managers and policymakers in the field of science and technology so that, while being aware of the current situation, they can make the necessary decisions and policies to improve the quality of scientific outputs.

The present research is a descriptive study that has been conducted using scientometrics and altmetrics indicators. The research population comprised of 119168 scientific outputs published by Iranian researchers in open-access journals and indexed by the Web of Science. Data were collected using two products of Clarivate Analytics, namely Web of Science and InCites. Also, the Altmetrics Explorer, a service provided by Altmetric Institute was used for altmetric data collection. Finally, SPSS software was used to perform the correlation test, and because the values of the variables were not normal (the significance of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, p0.01), Spearman's correlation test was used (significance level 0.01). Other research data were analyzed using Excel software (descriptive statistics).

Open-access articles by Iranian researchers grew by 99.9% and the largest number of open-access articles by Iranian researchers have been published in journals with the gold open-access model. Islamic Azad University, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, and Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences had the highest number of articles in open-access journals. Also, the largest number of articles by Iranian researchers have been published in medicine general internal journals (9342), chemistry multidisciplinary (6409), pharmacology pharmacy (5714), and mathematics (5235). The least number of open-access articles have been published in the subject areas of music (1), folklore (1), film, radio, and television (1).While the study of the received citations and the citation rate of the open access outputs of Iranian researchers indicated that the articles published in quality journals are of higher citation, about %40.05 of scientific output has been published in journals without quartile, %15.98 in Q4, %15.5in Q2, %14.34 in Q3, and % 14.11in Q1 journals.The findings showed that Iranian open-access scientific productions have been mentioned a total of 1,364,087 times in different media. The highest amount of attention and mention happened on Twitter (194,463), news (18,483), and Facebook (10,670). The results of correlation tests revealed statistically significant, positive, and poor relationships between the number of citations, altmetric score, mentions on Twitter, mentions on Facebook, and Mendeley readers.

Medical sciences universities of the country have contributed more to the publication of open-access scientific outputs, among the top 20 universities in the country in terms of the number of articles, the names of 10 medical sciences universities are visible. One of the reasons for this is the very important role of open access to medical articles and findings in increasing public awareness and health. With the publication of open access, the speed of access to the latest research and awareness of diseases will increase, and it will increase the level of health, and longevity in all countries of the world.On the other hand, the publication of a significant part of scientific outputs in Non-JCR indexed journals is very worth considering. Most of these journals are indexed in the Emerging Sources Citation Index. Gold open-access journals often receive very high fees for publishing articles, it is highly necessary to plan to inform researchers about the quality of these journals.