OA+: The End of the Communities of Attention Report

It’s been a year since we launched Open Access+, an enhancement to our open access support services that aims to help University of Manchester researchers raise the visibility of their work. Since March 2019, 397 papers have been opted in, we’ve tweeted over 2,000 times from @UoMOpenAccess and generated 380 unique Communities of Attention reports. You might even have seen Scott Taylor’s excellent UKSG Insights article about the service.

The idea behind the Communities of Attention reports was simple. If a Twitter account is tweeting frequently about papers published in x journal, it’s likely that the account is either a) a bot, b) the journal’s marketing team or, more interestingly, c) someone who is very interested in research in that field. This approach obviously works better for journals with a narrower scope, though there’s a lot to be said for broadening your network. Armed with this information, our researchers could (hopefully) identify the leading voices in their field or at least find some useful accounts to follow.

You might have noticed that I’ve been talking about the Communities of Attention reports in the past tense. Here’s why. The reports were generated via a time consuming process which involved Python scripts, APIs and lots of manual editing of CSV files. We received some positive feedback and, as there wasn’t any other way that our researchers could get this information, we thought this work was worthwhile.

Recently, partly inspired by the work we’ve been doing (we think!), Altmetric introduced the new “Mention Sources” feature. As a result, you’re now able to build your own much more sophisticated Communities of Attention report in just a few clicks. It’s really cool! You can select multiple journals and see which Twitter accounts, news platforms, blogs, etc. mention their papers most frequently. And much more besides. Here’s a short video of the feature in action.

In this video, I search for who’s tweeted most frequently about papers published in the journal Acta Astronautica and then drill down so I can see the top account and the associated tweets.

Rather than replicating what the Altmetric Explorer now does and presenting that information in a spreadsheet, we’ve decided it’d be better to just point our researchers to the Altmetric Explorer. Where we used to include Communities of Attention reports in emails to our researchers, we now include some instructions on making use of the new feature instead.

The Open Access+ service continues to go from strength to strength, however, and moving away from generating and circulating Communities of Attention reports will give us an opportunity to focus on more useful activities that will help our researchers raise the visibility of their work. We have exciting plans for the future that will help us do this. Watch this step!