Open access and proliferation : a quantitative study of how open access published articles are cited and distributed online

To publish research articles by the means of open access is to provide them for free to the reader. An increasing number of universities around the world have begun to institute open access policies regarding their researchers academic output, requiring them to primarily publish in open access journals and / or archive their pre- or post- prints in institutional archives. The aim of this this thesis is to explore how the adoption of the open access policy at the Swedish Universi- ty of Agricultural Sciences in 2008 has affected how their researchers publish and if this has had any effect on how their academic output are cited and distributed online. To reach this goal a combination of bibliometric and altmetric methods were used as well as cross-referencing between Scopus, Altmetric.com, Google Scholar and the SHERPA/RoMEO database. The results points towards a mostly open access positive trend with an increase in articles published in jour- nals that allow archiving of both pre- and post-prints. There also seems to be a correlation between these journals and which kind of articles gets the most mentions in social media