The wider context: OA in China

These gold OA articles are also widely discussed away from formal academic publications. This can be seen in the accumulation of the Altmetric Score, a compound measure of the attention a publication has received from traditional media, patents, policy documents, social media, and other online sources. Different sources are given different weightings in their contribution to an article’s Altmetric Score. For example, a mention in a news article will add eight points to an Altmetric Score, a mention in a policy document will add three, and a mention on X will add 0.25. 

Example Altmetric Score:

Altmetric Score is commonly used to understand international impact, and the social media platforms that are currently indexed by Altmetric are global rather than national in focus (X, Bluesky, Facebook, Reddit).⁵ As Altmetric does not track Chinese social media platforms, and policy and news mentions are dominated by international and English-language sources, the Altmetric Score is only provides only a partial picture of the true impact of China gold OA articles. Nonetheless, despite changes in social media practice and there being less time for the Altmetric Score to accumulate for more recent years, the total Altmetric Score for China’s gold OA articles published in 2024 is already at 510,000 compared to the score of 558,000 for articles published in 2020, which covers a longer period. In 2022, the Altmetric Score peaked at 703,000.  

The rise in the number of gold OA articles from China corresponds with researchers in China feeling more positive about OA. A 2024 Springer Nature survey of the OA perceptions of 1,593 researchers in China found that 55% were feeling more positive about OA compared with two years previously.⁶