Open Research Online

This month, I’ve decided to switch things back to a Top 10 rather than a Top 15, for no other reason than there were far too many downloads to report on should I have stuck with the latter. From memory, 14th place was tied between about 12 articles, and 15th even more!

On a related note, we do intend (this year) to implement within-item download stats. So, in the not too distant future, for any full-text article in ORO, you will be able to see how many times it has been downloaded in the current month, and in total. I’ll still compile a monthly Top 10, as I think it’s nice to highlight the most-downloaded, but for anyone who doesn’t appear in the list and is curious about downloads for their work, this will offer a solution.

Anyway, here’s the full list for September: ORO downloads 09_2010.

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)!

ORO article views 11_2009

oro-article-views-10_2009.doc

oro-article-views-09_2009.doc

Here are the top 10 most-viewed journal and non-journal articles on ORO during August 2009: oro-article-views-08_2009.doc.

Here are the top 10 most-viewed journal and non-journal articles on ORO in the month of July: oro-article-views-07_2009.doc. It is particularly pleasing to see the recently-announced 10,000th deposit in number one spot!

Many OU readers of this blog will know that, for some time, I’ve been producing a monthly top 10 of the most-viewed articles on ORO, both for journal and non-journal items. I’ve now decided to upload the top 10 lists to the blog every month, making it easier for anyone to view the information whenever they want. I’ll tag each posting with the category “top 10″, which might be useful if anyone wants to look at changes in the lists over time without having to trawl through the site looking for the relevant postings. Here are the top 10s for June 2009: oro-article-views-06_2009.doc.