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1 Until the past decade, most studies exploring the quality, reach and impact of research outputs have focused on data relating to journal articles (Torres-Salinas et al. 2014). Relatively little work has been done to explore the extent to which altmetrics approaches are capable of producing meaningful information about the role of specialist scholarly books in the research and knowledge sharing practices of scholarly communities (Neylon et al. 2018). However, digital traces of online interactions relating to scholarly books have the potential to shed light on how people use, discuss, and share monographs, as well as the role that individuals, institutions and platforms play in this process. These traces may also make it possible to better understand the effects of OA status on patterns of digital dissemination and use for scholarly books. As the authors, publishers and funders of long-form research publications search for strategies to support successful transitions to open access for books, such information is needed.

2 This paper explores the extent to which social media data is capable of shedding light on the digital lives of OA scholarly books. The paper begins with a discussion of key differences between monographs and journal articles and considers the implications of these differences for efforts to identify, capture, and analyse data associated with the use of OA scholarly books. It then goes on to report on a study of data related to 28 OA monographs in the humanities and social sciences. The study captured mentions of the study-set of monographs via Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia and online blogs; as well as user ratings on Google Books, Amazon …