o-bib goes Twitter – erste Erfahrungen

Zugleich ein Blick auf bibliothekarische und informationswissenschaftliche Fachzeitschriften in der Twittersphäre

Abstract

Since February 2020, the Open Access library journal o-bib, published by the VDB, has its own Twitter account (@obibJournal). The article describes the experiences made so far and compares the Twitter activities of o-bib with those of other German-speaking journals in library and information science. As of late, articles in o-bib are published continuously; every new article is tweeted. Since the tweets are integrated into the o-bib website, they also serve as a timeline for the published articles. For active Twitter users, the tweets are also a kind of anchor for distributing and/or commenting on new articles. Only some of the library and information science journals in the German-speaking world have a Twitter account - especially, but not only open access journals. An analysis of the tweets of nine journals over a period of six months shows that there are significant differences both in the number of tweets and in their distribution (original tweets vs. retweets) and their content. Finally, some suggestions are made for possible further development of the o-bib Twitter.