The ORO team are running a drop-in session next week on Thursday 11th March in the Digilab between 10:00-11.30.
Want to know how to deposit items or talk to us about a technical ORO query then come along to this session and a member of the team will be on hand to answer any questions you may have about ORO.
No need to book, just turn up!
As most people will know, up until now, I have regularly produced two monthly top 10 lists for ORO: the most-viewed journal articles and the most-viewed non-journal articles. However, I’ve always preferred the idea of providing figures on full-text downloads rather than visits, as I think this has the potential to provide people with much more meaningful information.
A visit to a particular article may well be someone genuinely interested in reading and using that bit of research, but, equally, it could be someone who has just performed a Google search, clicked through to the item on ORO, looked at it for a second, and then moved on because they realised it was not what they were after. A download, however, probably means a lot more than that. If that same someone has clicked through to the item on ORO, looked at the title and abstract, and then taken the decision to download the full text, I would say there is a fair chance they have made the decision that that document is going to be useful to them in some way. And if that someone is an academic carrying out a literature search for their next paper, it may even translate into citations for you!
Anyway, I’m not going to go into the reasons why I haven’t reported on downloads up until now, simply because they are boring technical things that no one will be interested in. However, suffice it to say we have now gotten over these boring technical problems and have been merrily recording full text downloads since the 15th of December 2009. So, without further ado, here is the first top 15 (no longer top 10!) downloads for January 2010: ORO downloads 01_2010a.
An oft-quoted statistic is that 63% of journals endorse immediate open access (OA) by allowing the Accepted Manuscrips of peer-reviewed papers to be deposited in institutional repositories. This of course leaves 37% for which an embargo is required, ranging from a few months to, well, infinity. To help with access to this embargoed material, many repositories make use of an “eprint request” button, allowing visitors to contact the main author from that institution and ask to be sent a copy by email. Essentially, this cuts out the time the user would otherwise need to invest in browsing the institution’s website, looking for the email address of the author, and generating a request themselves. It also makes use of the fact that, in most copyright assignment agreements, authors are allowed to distribute personal copies, for non-commercial reasons, to their peers and colleagues. There are some that argue the technicalities of this, but I won’t go into that here.
Instead, my reason for posting on this topic is to raise the possibility that, far from being a useful partner to OA, could the eprint request button, in fact, end up being an unforseen hindrance? What! (I hear you all shout). How can something that provides more efficient access to otherwise closed-access research be a problem? Well, the devil is in the detail… quite literally…
You see, with the eprint request button comes information. At the very least, that information will be a name, an email address (and thus an indication of the requestor’s institution), and a reason for wanting a copy of the paper in question. All of a sudden, rather than just being told his or her paper has been downloaded 50 times in the last month, the academic is finding out who wants to read their work and why. This is really valuable stuff, especially as we (in the UK at least) move increasingly towards having to justify the impact of our research. Which is going to go down better when it comes to the REF… that this or that paper, or this or that research theme, seems to have attracted a lot of traffic in our repository; or that we know for a fact that our research in such and such a field was requested by someone from local government to help develop a new policy. You see where I’m going with this…
Basically, I wonder whether there might come a point where academics prefer the closed-access/eprint-request option because it ends up telling them what they want to know, and, perhaps more importantly, what their institution needs to collect for research assessment purposes. I’m not saying this is something that will definitely happen, nor perhaps should I be planting the idea in the minds of OU academics who read this blog (!)… but, I do think it is an important issue to raise for discussion. So, feel free, go ahead and comment!
Last week, we reached what I believe to be a significant milestone with ORO: 25% of the research articles ORO contains are openly accessible to all. This compares to 15% just one and a half years ago, at the start of our current advocacy and development programme. During the same period, the number of articles ORO houses has risen from 7,112 to 11,898, which, taken together, I hope reflects a heightened interest and understanding among our academics here at the OU of the benefits of open access to research. In the remainder of this post, I’d just like to take a moment to remind us all of those benefits, and why thinking about open access to research is so important.
For whatever gain, the broadest possible audience for academic research has to be a priority, not only for the individual, or that individual’s institution, but also for society as a whole. Working on the assumption that, somewhere along the line, the research you are carrying out has some benefit to someone, or something, that someone or something needs access to your work.
So, let’s take the most common method of publication for academic research – the journal – and consider the audience you might be reaching by publishing in this way. You might argue that the vast majority of institutions will all subscribe to journals in which you publish and that therefore most people who will want to read and cite your work will be able to. However, the fact of the matter is, that there are so many journals in existence today, and they come at such a cost, that academic libraries simply cannot keep pace. Indeed, I was at an event recently where it was revealed that, based on the journals subscribed to by their two institutions, academics at Imperial College London and the University of Nottingham could, at best, only expect to access around 50% of each other’s research. In short, just because your library subscribes to a particular journal, it certainly does not mean that the next university down the road does. And then when you start thinking about access at poorer institutions, perhaps in the developing world, the access problem multipies even more.
Emerging from the problem of the cost of academic journals, of course there is an understandable tendency for the library community to advocate open access. However, alongside this, there is an equally understandable push from research funders as well, simply because they want the research they invest in to reach the widest possible audience, and thus maximise the chances of it having an impact of some kind. Indeed, in this country, the UK Research Councils all now have mandates requiring the research they fund to be made openly accessible as soon as possible after publication. This, to me, is central to the need for open access, and research funders are quite right to be thinking about and acting upon it. For people, society, and ultimately the world to benefit from research and scientific discovery, it is something that must be shared as openly as possible. In short, those involved in academic and scholarly research must, as part of that role, concern themselves with the effective proliferation of their findings. And the best way to do that, is through open access.
Finally, here’s a reminder of some FAQs on the ORO site for more information:
What are the benefits to researchers?
Included in this month’s most-viewed article stats is a new measure – something I’ve called the “Visitor Index”. This is something I’ve developed to give people an idea of how well-accessed their article is relative to the amount of time it’s actually been in ORO, or (more accurately) relative to when we began recording visitor stats with Google Analytics (19th July 2008).
The index is very easy to interpret. Basically, a value of 1 means you’ve had the same amount of unique visitors to your article as days the article has been in ORO, i.e. an average of 1 unique visitor per day. So, anything above 1 obviously means you’ve been getting an average of more than 1 unique visitor per day. Crudely, the greater your Visitor Index, the better!
So, what use might this be? Well, when looking at the top 10 most-viewed articles within a given month, the Visitor Index will help to provide a bit more context. For example, an article appearing in the top 10 with a relatively low Visitor Index might indicate a recent surge of interest in that particular piece of work. Equally, a recently-published journal paper, or maybe even an “In Press” journal paper, with a high Visitor Index would tell you that, no sooner that paper was deposited in ORO, people were keen to view it.
So, without further ado, here are the most-viewed (journal and non-journal) articles during the month of December 2009: ORO article views 12_2009. Comments welcome (as always)!
When I’m out and about advocating the use of ORO to broaden access to your research, one common question I get asked is “how do people find stuff in ORO?” Well, it’s true to say that almost no one, when carrying out a literature search, will think to themselves “I know, let’s visit the OU’s repository and have a nose around for anything useful!” Instead, the vast majority (79% in November, in fact) discover your research deposited in ORO having first turned to a search engine. And there are no surprises for guessing the most popular one… yes, 70% of that 79% came from Google. This all compares to around 17% coming from referring sites, and 5% being direct traffic.
This is all very well, but I’m sure you’re interested in a bit more detail than that. For instance, what keywords are people using? What countries do visitors come from? What cities do they come from? What universities do they come from?! Well, for the month of November 2009, here’s a summary for you:
Top 10 key words/phrases used in Google, directing people to ORO:
So, congratulations to Professor Raphael Kaplinsky for being the most-searched-for OU author in November! And clearly, there are other specific OU publications that peope are looking for. However, beyond that, the above list demonstrates how pretty simple key words or phrases can lead people to your research. Indeed, if we drill down to the next ten key words/phrases, we get things like “mossaic approach”, “fraser guidelines”, and “magnesium shot peening”. It is of course no coincidence that papers relating to these subject areas also appeared in November’s top 10 most-viewed items on ORO.
So, onto some more juicy information! Here are some top 5 lists for which universities visitors in November came from:
UK (excluding the OU):
Western Europe:
North America:
Perhaps even more interesting is to look at an individual paper. For instance, let’s take the most-viewed journal article on ORO in November, Dr Marc Cornock’s paper “Fraser guidelines or Gillick competence?”, published in the Journal of Children’s and Young People’s Nursing in 2007. Since being deposited in ORO on the 1st of May 2009, this paper has had almost 1000 unique views from 328 different network locations. Among those, we can see that Dr Cornock’s paper has attracted interest from a variety of sources. For example, Penwith College, in Cornwall; Tower Hamlets NHS Primary Care Trust; Brighton & Hove Unitary Authority; Leeds Metropolitan University; Southampton City Council… to name but a few of the most common.
Obviously, looking into this much detail takes time and resources, but if anyone is interested in finding out more about who is accessing their work through ORO, do please get in touch. I’ll see what I can do!
I’d just like to take a moment to showcase a recent ORO entry, which I think demonstrates how a repository record can actually look reasonably attractive, and offer a bit more other than just a single-point entry for one particular article, or item.
A number of OU authors have recently been involved (as editors and contributors) in the publication of a book entitled “Environment, Development, and Sustainability: Perspectives and cases from around the world”. The main entry in ORO for this book can be found here: http://oro.open.ac.uk/19088.
As you will see when you visit the page in ORO, in the “Extra Information” field we have provided links through to the individual book chapter records in ORO by OU contributors. You will also see that three of the links indicate that the full text is openly available (we received permission from Oxford University Press to do this). If you then choose one of the chapters to click through to, you will see that there is also a link back to the main book entry. Thus, if someone arrives at one of the individual chapters (say via a Google search), they can then very easily find out more information about the book as a whole.
I would certainly encourage OU academics to consider cross-linking in this way. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a book and its associated chapters; it could, for example, be a series of related journal articles. If anyone is interested in doing this, do please get in touch.
On a related note, we are planning to make author names clickable in the near future, so that if someone comes across a particular article by an OU author, they can, with one click, see a list of all publications on ORO by that same author. Watch this space!
For those of you who have heard me speaking about ORO, you will perhaps have the impression that ORO only takes peer-reviewed published research. However, in response to the realisation that OU faculty members disseminate their research in so many more ways than that, as well as the recognition by HEFCE of so-called “grey literature”, I’ve decided to firm up ORO’s policies and guidelines on this.
ORO’s opening help page, which explains what the repository’s coverage is, will now tell you the following:
“Open Research Online is an Open Access repository of the Open University’s peer-reviewed and published research, as well as other research output types which meet the “Frascati” definition of research.”
Some of you (particularly those involved heavily in the last RAE, or those already au fait with the ins and outs of the REF) will already know and understand what the “Frascati” definition of research is. For those who don’t, we’ve added an FAQ to the ORO help pages.
Alongside this, we’ve also made it clearer what item types can be deposited in ORO; the existing FAQ has been expanded.
Beyond this, if you (and by “you” I mean OU academics depositing in ORO) are still unclear whether a particular research output type can be deposited in ORO, you should direct your query to the Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research & Enterprise), Professor Brigid Heywood.
As always, please do post your thoughts and comments in response to this…
There is no doubt that a very good way to embed an institutional repository across campus is to encourage people to create publication feeds from it. For example, in indivudal staff pages, research group pages, or (as we are doing here at the OU at the moment) in an online research degrees prospectus. Not only does this help demonstrate to Faculty that the repository has uses, it also encourages academics to keep depositing their publications, so as to not adversely affect the content of the feeds created.
The most commonly used feed system is of course RSS, and all repository software comes RSS-ready, out-of-the-box. But exactly how useful are RSS feeds for the type of content a research repository contains? I would argue not very, and this has long been a concern of mine. The reason is, like RSS, really simple: standard RSS feeds do not deliver repository content in an order which is useful for Faculty pages, i.e. by date of publication.
I mentioned above that we are embedding publication feeds from ORO in our soon-to-be-launched online research degrees prospectus. When I was approached about this I explained that RSS feeds would be very easy to implement, but that they would deliver the most recent content added to the repository, and not necessarily the most recently published items. Nevertheless, it was decided to go ahead, mainly due to tight time schedules. I suspected that when the prospectus went out for approval to Faculties this decision would come back to bite, and I was right.
RSS feeds provide a reflection of recent activity in the repository, and not necessarily recently-published research. We are in the process of uploading a selection of exemplar (but old) PhD theses at the moment, so naturally these appeared in the RSS feeds for the prospectus. Also, in another area, one particular person had been spending some time depositing a large number of his publications, and so the RSS feed consisted only of that person’s work.
Of course, there are solutions. It is quite easy to re-write RSS for it to be delivered in a different way, and this is indeed what we are doing for the research degrees prospectus. However, RSS is a standard, and so we cannot really change it for the whole site. Just because someone wants their RSS feeds delivered like this, does that mean the next person will? But, I return to my original question of this post: exactly how usefel are standard RSS feeds for research repository content? Although “recently added” probably has a use, I think “recently published” has more.