Open Research Online

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:

1. “human computer interaction”
2. ageism
3. photography
4. physiotherapy
5. author = Preece; title = interaction design: beyond human-computer interaction
6. Kaplinsky
7. ORO
8. anthropology
9. family sex
10. author = Gill; title = gender and media

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):

1. University of Cambridge (92 visits)
2. University of Oxford (82 visits)
3. University of Manchester (73 visits)
4. University of Southampton (72 visits)
5. University of Nottingham (58 visits)

Western Europe:

1. University of Potsdam, Germany (24 visits)
2. University of Amsterdam, Netherands (17 visits)
3. Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium (15 visits)
4. University of Vienna, Austria (15 visits)
5. Erasmus University, Rotterdam (13 visits)

North America:

1. University of British Columbia, Canada (21 visits)
2. McGill University, Canada (18 visits)
3. University of Minnesota, USA (18 visits)
4. University of Toronto, Canada (18 visits)
5. Indiana University, USA (15 visits)

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!

ORO article views 11_2009

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.