Understanding Public Use of Open Access Social Science Research

Understanding the context of open science use remains a challenge. Non-researcher use of scholarly information is particularly difficult to capture given the dearth of metrics and metadata needed to structure an empirical inquiry. The “Your Story Matters” program at the Harvard DASH repository is a rare systematic effort to monitor use of OA. The site captures anecdotes about the impact that OA has on those outside of the US academy. For this project, the data consist of 3,548 user comments (e.g. DASH "stories") from 2012 to 2018. The proposed poster describes the nature of this OA use, with particular attention paid to public users and their uptake of social science research. The methodological tools deployed involve classification via supervised machine learning and N-grams. I find that Economic research is of greatest interest among the general public, and non-US international use is also predominant. The research has implications for how to measure contextual impact of Open Science.