Open Research Online

A slightly belated posting on this, as it has already been featured in the news section of the University’s main website, as well as an Intranet news item. But, just in case these have passed you by, or you are an external reader of this blog, I am very proud to announce the fact that ORO now houses over 10,000 research articles. The 10,000th item was recently deposited by Professor Agnes Kukulska-Hulme and is a journal paper on the subject of mobile learning. Here is a link to the paper in ORO, which (I’m pleased to say) is a fully open access item: http://oro.open.ac.uk/16987.

Ordinarily, the publisher of the journal in which this paper was published (Cambridge University Press) allows author final drafts to be deposited in Open Access institutional repositries such as ORO, with the final published PDF permitted after a one-year embargo. However, given the special significance of this paper to ORO, Cambridge University Press kindly allowed us to deposit the final published version straight away.

So, congratulations to Professor Kukulska-Hulme for providing the 10,000th item, but also I think a very big thank you is in order for everyone else who have been contributing content for ORO recently. In the year I’ve been managing ORO I have been very pleasantly surprised by its growth and the willingness of OU researchers to engage with ORO and build it into their publishing routines.

For interest, the official press release relating to this story can be viewed here: 090702-oro-hits-10000-items.doc.

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.

Les Carr, an academic at the University of Southampton and Director of EPrints (the repository software used by ORO), has recently taken a look at the productivity of institutional repositories based on their numbers of “active days”. In other words, using the amount of days in a year that items have been deposited and processed by a repository, rather than the total number of items the repository contains, as a measure of its success. I wholeheartedly agree with Les that a successful repository is a sustainable repository, and that size is not necessarily the best indication of this. Indeed, I have written about this before on this blog in ”Why size doesn’t matter but self-archiving does“.

The good news is that, according to Les’ analysis, ORO is the 6th most hard working repository in the UK, with 219 days of activity out of a possible 233 (taking into account weekends and bank holidays). Personally, I’m really pleased to see ORO in this light, and, as Les mentions in his post, we can view this as a very real indication of ORO’s ‘vitality’ and ‘embededness’ within the OU.