Scholarly journals are increasingly using social media to share their latest research publications and communicate with their readers. Having a presence on social media gives journals a platform to raise their profile and promote their content. This study compares the number of clicks received when journals provide two types of links to subscription articles: open access (OA) and paid content links. We examine the OA effect using unique matched-pair data for the journal Nature Materials. Our study finds that OA links perform better than paid content links. In particular, when the journal does not indicate that a link to an article is an OA link, there is an obvious drop in performance against clicks on links indicating OA status. OA has a positive effect on the number of clicks in all countries, but its positive impact is slightly greater in developed countries. The results suggest that free content is more attractive to users than paid content. Social media exposure of scholarly articles promotes the use of research outputs. Combining social media dissemination with OA appears to enhance the reach of scientific information. However, extensive further efforts are needed to remove barriers to OA.

学术期刊越来越多地使用社交媒体来分享其最新研究出版物并与读者交流。在社交媒体上的存在为期刊提供了一个提高其知名度和宣传其内容的平台。这项研究比较了期刊提供两种订阅文章链接时获得的点击次数：开放访问（OA）和付费内容链接。我们使用《自然材料》（Nature Materials）杂志的独特配对数据来研究OA效应。我们的研究发现，OA链接的性能优于付费内容链接。特别是，当日记不表示与文章的链接是OA链接时，点击表示OA状态的链接的性能会明显下降。OA在所有国家/地区都对点击次数产生积极影响，但在发达国家中，它的积极影响要大一些。结果表明，免费内容比付费内容对用户更具吸引力。社会媒体对学术文章的曝光促进了研究成果的使用。将社交媒体传播与OA结合起来似乎可以增强科学信息的覆盖范围。然而，需要进一步的努力来消除OA的障碍。