The funding for this work was provided by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation as part of a grant to the Open UCT Initiative. http://openuct.uct.ac.za/Visit the OpenUCT repository at: http://open.uct.ac.za/

Authors: Michelle Willmers, Sarah Goodier, Kyle Rother, Sally Hofmeyr & Laura Czerniewicz

Remarkable spike in repository activity (in the form of ‘views’) in the promotion activity month, with 10 of the 15 profiled resources showing over 100% increase in views as a result of only three to five directed tweets on each.

Number of visits did generally not recede to initial levels in the month directly after Twitter activity, indicating that these singular promotional acts have an impact in terms of file visits and visibility beyond just the ‘moment’ in which they are communicated.

The resource with the highest percentage of increased views in the un-promoted resources was ‘How to create a species list from the Virtual Museum projects’. This resource is titled similarly titled to the promoted resource ‘How to create a species distribution map in the Virtual Museum’, which enjoyed increased visibility as a result of promotion activity. This suggests that the un-promoted resource may have enjoyed a spill-over effect in increased visibility from the promotion activity.

REFERENCESAbrahams L, Burke M, Gray E. & Rens A (2008). Opening access to knowledge in Southern African universities. Study Series 2008, Southern African Regional Universities Association. Available at: http://www.sarua.org/?q=publications/opening-access-knowledge-southern-african-universities.

UNESCO (2010) UNESCO Science Report: the current status of science around the world. Paris: UNESCO. Available at: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001899/189958e.pdf

Trotter, H; Kell, C; Willmers, M; Gray E; King, T- 2014 Seeking Impact and Visibility: Scholarly Communication in Southern Africa. Final Report of the Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme http://open.uct.ac.za/handle/11427/2310

BREAKDOWN OF RESOURCE VIEWS BY MONTH (PROMOTED AND UN-PROMOTED)

RESOURCE TITLE VIEWS

RESOURCE TYPE

PROMOTION ACTIVITY

% INCREASE IN VIEWS

PROMOTED RESOURCES Aug 2014 Sept 2014 Oct 2014

Secretarybird sagittarius serpentarius population trends and ecology: insights from South African citizen science data Paper 79 219 177 35

How to create a species distribution map in the Virtual Museum Presentation 22 108 391 20Citizen Science ¬ Mammal Map Sound File 0 96 undefined 43IntroStat Textbook 273 411 51 358A nation in search of jobs: Six possible policy suggestions for employment creation in South Africa Working Paper 0 99 undefined 18Africa’s jobs challenge Policy Brief 0 122 undefined 23An overview of strike activities in South Africa, 1999¬2011 Fact Sheet 0 135 undefined 16Education and inequality: The South African case Working Paper 33 218 561 56Health outcomes for children born to teen mothers in Cape Town, South Africa Working Paper 29 164 466 51Distance as a barrier to health care access in South Africa Working Paper 63 307 387 110Illustrating impact: Applying altmetrics to Southern African research Report 5 118 2 260 29Why universities should care about Altmetrics Blog Post 6 123 1 950 14Bottlenecks in the Open-Access system: Voices from around the globe Paper 6 149 2 383 18Open Access Week 2013 at UCT Video 14 99 607 23Discoverability and 21st century scholarly communication: A local perspective Presentation 0 89 undefined 19

UN-PROMOTED RESOURCES (CONTROL) Aug 2014 Sept 2014 Oct 2014

Does seasonality drive spatial patterns in demography? Variation in survival in African reed warblers Acrocephalus baeticatus across southern Africa does not reflect global patterns Paper 12 28 133 23

How to create a species list from the Virtual Museum projects Presentation 6 20 233 12Citizen Science ¬ Special Days Sound File 0 17 undefined 28Analysing wage formation in the South African labour markets: The role of bargaining councils Working Paper 0 3 undefined 8Analysing wage formation in the South African labour markets: The role of bargaining councils Policy Brief 0 5 undefined 10An overview of the South African labour market from Quarter 2 of 2009 to Quarter 2 of 2010 Fact Sheet 0 8 undefined 3New evidence on subjective well-being and the definition of unemployment in South Africa Paper 15 23 53 17The evolution and impact of unconditional cash transfers in South Africa Paper 32 20 -6 22Changes in education, employment and earnings in South Africa: A cohort analysis Working Paper 41 55 34 41Research publishing models: a guide for university managers Brief 4 17 325 15Promoting discoverability of African scholarship Blog Post 3 12 300 10Scholarly communication at the University of Cape Town: Case study report Report 6 28 367 24Addressing academic profile: New tools and services for boosting online visibility Presentation 3 95 3 067 16

FINDINGS

Open content provides significant opportunities for research and educational purposes – particularly in the many contexts where limited or non-existent access to resources is a serious constraint (Abrahams et al. 2008). There are, however, concerns around the uneven spread of online content in terms of geographical original and language.

While it can be considered a global issue, the visibility challenge is particularly acute for scholars in Sub-Saharan Africa, whose publication activity only accounts for 1.1% of formal global knowledge production (UNESCO 2010). The challenge is made more acute by the fact that only a narrow form of output is foregrounded and measured (i.e. books and journal articles), whereas it has been found that Southern African scholars produce a wide range of scholarly output types (Trotter et al. 2014).

Repositories provide significant affordances for promoting the visibility of a wide range of scholarly outputs, particularly because they make provision for the association of rich metadata that increases the likelihood of content surfacing in internet searches. While crucial, curation of online content is however increasingly considered to be insufficient for optimal visibility – these efforts need to be matched by interventions to actively promote content amongst interested networks and user groups.

Social media tools such as Twitter are useful for promoting content and penetrating networks. This experiment set out to investigate whether the promotion of content via Twitter could increase the visibility of resources and boost repository traffic to those resources.

BACKGROUNDRESEARCH QUESTION

Can promotion of open content via Twitter increase repository traffic and the visibility of online resources?

1 Selection of content sample 2 Promotion of

content through Twitter 3 Collection of

data through site statistics

The experiment was conducted over a three-month period (August to October 2014). Sample resources for profiling purposes were selected from the OpenUCT and OpenSALDRU repositories at the University of Cape Town. Fifteen resources were selected for promotion with a corresponding number identified for control purposes. The sample set of resources was comprised of a variety of output types, the only criteria being that they should be openly available (i.e. not behind publisher paywalls).

In the first month of the experiment (August 2014), statistics of repository views for each resource were captured.

In the second month of the experiment (September 2014), a selected sub-set of resources was promoted via Twitter. Tweets were drafted by extracting ‘sound bites’ from the resources, i.e. phrases that were seen to reflect a key finding or highlight a pertinent issue contained within the resource. Each tweet included the sound bite, a handle (persistent identifier) where the resource could be accessed in a repository, and a number of relevant hashtags. They followed a consistent format and included the OpenUCT handle as a contextualising component. After a week of active promotion, statistics were gathered from the repository’s native site statistics – including record views and file visits per month.

In the third month of the experiment (October 2014), there was no Twitter activity on the profile resources and statistics on views received in this month were captured once again.

METHOD

The methodology for the experiment consisted of three components:

Open Education Global Conference 2015

CONTENT PROMOTION AND VISIBILITY: A SOCIAL MEDIA EXPERIMENT